A Window in Thrums | Page 3

and
honeysuckle over the door. Life is not always hard, even after backs
grow bent, and we know that all braes lead only to the grave.
This is Jess's window. For more than twenty years she had not been
able to go so far as the door, and only once while I knew her was she
ben in the room. With her husband, Hendry, or their only daughter,
Leeby, to lean upon, and her hand clutching her staff, she took twice a
day, when she was strong, the journey between her bed and the window
where stood her chair. She did not lie there looking at the sparrows or
at Leeby redding up the house, and I hardly ever heard her complain.
All the sewing was done by her; she often baked on a table pushed
close to the window, and by leaning forward she could stir the porridge.
Leeby was seldom off her feet, but I do not know that she did more
than Jess, who liked to tell me, when she had a moment to spare, that
she had a terrible lot to be thankful for.
To those who dwell in great cities Thrums is only a small place, but
what a clatter of life it has for me when I come to it from my
school-house in the glen. Had my lot been cast in a town I would no
doubt have sought country parts during my September holiday, but the
school-house is quiet even when the summer takes brakes full of

sportsmen and others past the top of my footpath, and I was always
light-hearted when Craigiebuckle's cart bore me into the din of Thrums.
I only once stayed during the whole of my holiday at the house on the
brae, but I knew its inmates for many years, including Jamie, the son,
who was a barber in London. Of their ancestry I never heard. With us it
was only some of the articles of furniture, or perhaps a snuff-mull, that
had a genealogical tree. In the house on the brae was a great kettle,
called the boiler, that was said to be fifty years old in the days of
Hendry's grandfather, of whom nothing more is known. Jess's chair,
which had carved arms and a seat stuffed with rags, had been Snecky
Hobart's father's before it was hers, and old Snecky bought it at a roup
in the Tenements. Jess's rarest possession was, perhaps, the christening
robe that even people at a distance came to borrow. Her mother could
count up a hundred persons who had been baptized in it.
Every one of the hundred, I believe, is dead, and even I cannot now
pick out Jess and Hendry's grave; but I heard recently that the
christening robe is still in use. It is strange that I should still be left after
so many changes, one of the three or four who can to-day stand on the
brae and point out Jess's window. The little window commands the
incline to the point where the brae suddenly jerks out of sight in its
climb down into the town. The steep path up the commonty makes for
this elbow of the brae, and thus, whichever way the traveller takes, it is
here that he comes first into sight of the window. Here, too, those who
go to the town from the south get their first glimpse of Thrums.
Carts pass up and down the brae every few minutes, and there comes an
occasional gig. Seldom is the brae empty, for many live beyond the top
of it now, and men and women go by to their work, children to school
or play. Not one of the children I see from the window to-day is known
to me, and most of the men and women I only recognize by their
likeness to their parents. That sweet-faced old woman with the shawl
on her shoulders may be one of the girls who was playing at the game
of palaulays when Jamie stole into Thrums for the last time; the man
who is leaning on the commonty gate gathering breath for the last
quarter of the brae may, as a barefooted callant, have been one of those
who chased Cree Queery past the poor-house. I cannot say; but this I

know, that the grandparents of most of these boys and girls were once
young with me. If I see the sons and daughters of my friends grown old,
I also see the grandchildren spinning the peerie and hunkering at
I-dree-I-dree--I-droppit-it--as we did so long ago. The world remains as
young as ever. The lovers that met on the commonty in the gloaming
are gone, but there are other lovers to take their place, and still the
commonty is here. The sun had