and, as I was talking at the time, my tongue happened to be in the way of my teeth when they were closed by the blow, and a deep gash was cut on the side of it, which bled profusely.  Mother came running at the noise I made, wrapped me up, put me in the servant girl’s arms and told her to run with me through the garden and out by a back way to Peter Lawson to have something done to stop the bleeding.  He simply pushed a wad of cotton into my mouth after soaking it in some brown astringent stuff, and told me to be sure to keep my mouth shut and all would soon be well.  Mother put me to bed, calmed my fears, and told me to lie still and sleep like a gude bairn.  But just as I was dropping off to sleep I swallowed the bulky wad of medicated cotton and with it, as I imagined, my tongue also.  My screams over so great a loss brought mother, darkest corners of the house, and oftentimes a long search was required to find me.  But after we were a few years older, we enjoyed bathing with other boys as we wandered along the shore, careful, however, not to get into a pool that had an invisible boy-devouring monster at the bottom of it.  Such pools, miniature maelstroms, were called “sookin-in-goats” and were well known to most of us.  Nevertheless we never ventured into any pool on strange parts of the coast before we had thrust a stick into it.  If the stick were not pulled out of our hands, we boldly entered and enjoyed plashing and ducking long ere we had learned to swim.

One of our best playgrounds was the famous old Dunbar Castle, to which King Edward fled after his defeat at Bannockburn.  It was built more than a thousand years ago, and though we knew little of its history, we had heard many mysterious stories of the battles fought about its walls, and firmly believed that every bone we found in the ruins belonged to an ancient warrior.  We tried to see who could climb highest on the crumbling peaks and crags, and took chances that no cautious mountaineer would try.  That I did not fall and finish my rock-scrambling in those adventurous boyhood days seems now a reasonable wonder.

Among our best games were running, jumping, wrestling, and scrambling.  I was so proud of my skill as a climber that when I first heard of hell from a servant girl who loved to tell its horrors and warn us that if we did anything wrong we would be cast into it, I always insisted that I could climb out of it.  I imagined it was only a sooty pit with stone walls like those of the castle, and I felt sure there must be chinks and cracks in the masonry for fingers and toes.  Anyhow the terrors of the horrible place seldom lasted long beyond the telling; for natural faith casts out fear.