Tommy gave him a look that meant, “Fits are just wasted on you,” and Corp replied with another that meant, “I ken they are.”  Then they parted, one of them to reflect.

“Corp,” he said excitedly, when next they met, “has Mr. Ogilvy or the lady ever come to see you afore?”

They had not, and Corp was able to swear that they did not even know him by sight.

“They dinna ken me either,” said Tommy.

“What does that matter?” asked Corp, but Tommy was too full to speak.  He had “found a way.”

The lady and Mr. Ogilvy found Corp such a success that the one gave him a shilling and the other took down his reminiscences in a note-book.  But if you would hear of the rings of blue and white and yellow Corp saw, and of the other extraordinary experiences he described himself as having when in a fit, you need not search that note-book, for the page has been torn out.  Instead of making inquiries of Mr. Ogilvy, try any other dominie in the district, Mr. Cathro, for instance, who delighted to tell the tale.  This of course was when it leaked out that Tommy had personated Corp, by arrangement with the real Corp, who was listening in rapture beneath the bed.

Tommy, who played his part so well that he came out of it in a daze, had Corp at heel from that hour.  He told him what a rogue he had been in London, and Corp cried admiringly, “Oh, you deevil! oh, you queer little deevil!” and sometimes it was Elspeth who was narrator, and then Tommy’s noble acts were the subject; but still Corp’s comment was “Oh, the deevil! oh, the queer little deevil!” Elspeth was flattered by his hero-worship, but his language shocked her, and after consulting Miss Ailie she advised him to count twenty when he felt an oath coming, at the end of which exercise the desire to swear would have passed away.  Good-natured Corp willingly promised to try this, but he was never hopeful, and as he explained to Tommy, after a failure, “It just made me waur than ever, for when I had counted the twenty I said a big Damn, thoughtful-like, and syne out jumpit three little damns, like as if the first ane had cleckit in my mouth.”

It was fortunate that Elspeth liked Corp on the whole, for during the three years now to be rapidly passed over, Tommy took delight in his society, though he never treated him as an equal; Corp indeed did not expect that, and was humbly grateful for what he got.  In summer, fishing was their great diversion.  They would set off as early as four in the morning, fishing wands in hand, and scour the world for trout, plodding home in the gloaming with stones in their fishing-basket to deceive those who felt its weight.  In the long winter nights they liked best to listen to Blinder’s tales of the Thrums Jacobites, tales never put into writing, but handed down from father to son, and proved true in the oddest of ways, as by Blinder’s trick of involuntarily holding out his hands to a fire when he found himself near one, though he might be sweating to the shirt and the time a July forenoon.  “I make no doubt,” he told them, “as I do that because my forbear, Buchan Osler (called Buchan wi’ the Haap after the wars was ower), had to hod so lang frae the troopers, and them so greedy for him that he daredna crawl to a fire once in an eight days.”