House, which had changed his opinion, but none that had ever changed his vote.”  I recollect hearing of his dining in London sixty years ago, at the house of a Scottish friend, where there was a swell party, and Pitfour was introduced as a great northern proprietor, and county M.P.  A fashionable lady patronised him graciously, and took great charge of him, and asked him about his estates.  Pitfour was very dry and sparing in his communications, as for example, “What does your home farm chiefly produce, Mr. Fergusson?” Answer, “Girss.”  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Fergusson, what does your home farm produce?” All she could extract was, “Girss.”

Of another laird, whom I heard often spoken of in old times, an anecdote was told strongly Scottish.  Our friend had much difficulty (as many worthy lairds have had) in meeting the claims of those two woeful periods of the year called with us in Scotland the “tarmes.”  He had been employing for some time as workman a stranger from the south on some house repairs, of the not uncommon name in England of Christmas.  His servant early one morning called out at the laird’s door in great excitement that “Christmas had run away, and nobody knew where he had gone.”  He coolly turned in his bed with the ejaculation, “I only wish he had taken Whitsunday and Martinmas along with him.”  I do not know a better illustration of quiet, shrewd, and acute Scottish humour than the following little story, which an esteemed correspondent mentions having heard from his father when a boy, relating to a former Duke of Athole, who had no family of his own, and whom he mentions as having remembered very well:—­He met, one morning, one of his cottars or gardeners, whose wife he knew to be in the hopeful way.  Asking him “how Marget was the day,” the man replied that she had that morning given him twins.  Upon which the Duke said,—­“Weel, Donald; ye ken the Almighty never sends bairns without the meat.”  “That may be, your Grace,” said Donald; “but whiles I think that Providence maks a mistak in thae matters, and sends the bairns to ae hoose and the meat to anither!” The Duke took the hint, and sent him a cow with calf the following morning.

I have heard of an amusing scene between a laird, noted for his meanness, and a wandering sort of Edie Ochiltree, a well-known itinerant who lived by his wits and what he could pick up in his rounds amongst the houses through the country.  The laird, having seen the beggar sit down near his gate to examine the contents of his pock or wallet, conjectured that he had come from his house, and so drew near to see what he had carried off.  As the laird was keenly investigating the mendicant’s spoils, his quick eye detected some bones on which there remained more meat than should have been allowed to leave his kitchen.  Accordingly he pounced upon the bones, declaring he had been robbed, and insisted on the beggar returning to the house and giving back the spoil.  He was,