the kitchen.”  A quaint and characteristic reply I recollect from another farm-servant.  My eldest brother had just been constructing a piece of machinery which was driven by a stream of water running through the home farmyard.  There was a thrashing machine, a winnowing machine, and circular saw for splitting trees into paling, and other contrivances of a like kind.  Observing an old man, who had long been about the place, looking very attentively at all that was going on, he said, “Wonderful things people can do now, Robby!” “Ay,” said Robby; “indeed, Sir Alexander, I’m thinking gin Solomon were alive noo he’d be thocht naething o’!”

The two following derive their force entirely from the Scottish turn of the expressions.  Translated into English, they would lose all point—­at least, much of the point which they now have:—­

At the sale of an antiquarian gentleman’s effects in Roxburghshire, which Sir Walter Scott happened to attend, there was one little article, a Roman patina, which occasioned a good deal of competition, and was eventually knocked down to the distinguished baronet at a high price.  Sir Walter was excessively amused during the time of bidding to observe how much it excited the astonishment of an old woman, who had evidently come there to buy culinary utensils on a more economical principle.  “If the parritch-pan,” she at last burst out—­“If the parritch-pan gangs at that, what will the kail-pat gang for?”

An ancestor of Sir Walter Scott joined the Stuart Prince in 1715, and, with his brother, was engaged in that unfortunate adventure which ended in a skirmish and captivity at Preston.  It was the fashion of those times for all persons of the rank of gentlemen to wear scarlet waistcoats.  A ball had struck one of the brothers, and carried part of this dress into his body, and in this condition he was taken prisoner with a number of his companions, and stripped, as was too often the practice in those remorseless wars.  Thus wounded, and nearly naked, having only a shirt on, and an old sack about him, the ancestor of the great poet was sitting, along with his brother and a hundred and fifty unfortunate gentlemen, in a granary at Preston.  The wounded man fell sick, as the story goes, and vomited the scarlet cloth which the ball had passed into the wound.  “O man, Wattie,” cried his brother, “if you have a wardrobe in your wame, I wish you would vomit me a pair o’ breeks.”  But, after all, it was amongst the old ladies that the great abundance of choice pungent Scottish expressions, such as you certainly do not meet with in these days, was to be sought.  In their position of society, education either in England, or education conducted by English teachers, has so spread in Scottish families, and intercourse with the south has been so increased, that all these colloquial peculiarities are fast disappearing.  Some of the ladies of this older school felt some indignation at the change which they lived to see was