Angels Ministers | Page 3

pulled a salmon out o' the water as soon as you'd hooked him. And he thought that a haggis was made of a sheep's head boiled in whisky. Oh, he's very innocent, Ma'am, if you get him where he's not expecting you.
QUEEN. Well, Brown, there are some things you can teach him, I don't doubt; and there are some things he can teach you. I'm sure he has taught me a great deal.
J.B. Ay? It's a credit to ye both, then.
QUEEN. He lets me think for myself, Brown; and that's what so many of my ministers would rather I didn't. They want me to be merely the receptacle of their own opinions. No, Brown, that's what we Stewarts are never going to do!
J.B. Nor would I, Ma'am, if I were in your shoes. But believe me, you can do more, being a mere woman, so to speak, than many a king can do.
QUEEN. Yes; being a woman has its advantages, I know.
J.B. For you can get round 'em, Ma'am; and you can put 'em off; and you can make it very awkward for them--very awkward--to have a difference of opinion with you.
QUEEN (_good-humouredly_). You and I have had differences of opinion sometimes, Brown.
J.B. True, Ma'am; that has happened; I've known it happen. And I've never regretted it, never! But the difference there is, Ma'am, that I'm not your Prime Minister. Had I been--you'd 'a been more stiff about giving in--naturally! Now there's Mr. Gladstone, Ma'am; I'm not denying he's a great man; but he's got too many ideas for my liking, far too many! I'm not against temperance any more than he is--put in its right place. But he's got that crazy notion of "local option" in his mind; he's coming to it, gradually. And he doesn't think how giving "local option," to them that don't take the wide view of things, may do harm to a locality. You must be wide in your views, else you do somebody an injustice.
QUEEN. Yes, Brown; and that is why I like being up in the hills, where the views are wide.
J.B. I put it this way, Ma'am. You come to a locality, and you find you can't get served as you are accustomed to be served. Well! you don't go there again, and you tell others not to go; and so the place gets a bad name. I've a brother who keeps an inn down at Aberlochy on the coach route, and he tells me that more than half his customers come from outside the locality.
QUEEN. Of course; naturally!
J.B. Well now, Ma'am, it'll be for the bad locality to have half the custom that comes to it turned away, because of local option! And believe me, Ma'am, that's what it will come to. People living in it won't see till the shoe pinches them; and by that time my brother, and others like him, will have been ruined in their business.
QUEEN. Local option is not going to come yet, Brown.
J.B. (_firmly_). No, Ma'am, not while I vote conservative, it won't. But I was looking ahead; I was talking about Mr. Gladstone.
QUEEN. Mr. Gladstone has retired from politics. At least he is not going to take office again.
J.B. Don't you believe him, Ma'am. Mr. Gladstone is not a retiring character. He's in to-day's paper again--columns of him; have ye seen?
QUEEN. Yes; quite as much as I wish to see.
J.B. And there's something in what he says, I don't deny.
QUEEN. There's a great deal in what he says, I don't understand, and that I don't wish to.
J.B. Now you never said a truer thing than that in your life, Ma'am! That's just how I find him. Oh, but he's a great man; and it's wonderful how he appreciates the Scot, and looks up to his opinion.
(_But this is a line of conversation in which his Royal Mistress declines to be interested. And she is helped, at that moment, by something which really does interest her_.)
QUEEN. Brown, how did you come to scratch your leg?
J.B. 'Twas not me, Ma'am; 'twas the stable cat did that--just now while Mop was having his walk.
QUEEN. Poor dear Brown! Did she fly at you?
J.B. Well, 'twas like this, Ma'am; first Mop went for her, then she went for him. And I tell ye she'd have scraped his eyes out if I'd left it to a finish.
QUEEN. Ferocious creature! She must be mad.
J.B. Well, Ma'am, I don't know whether a cat-and-dog fight is a case of what God hath joined together; but it's the hard thing for man to put asunder! And that's the scraping I got for it, when I tried.
QUEEN. You must have it cauterised, Brown. I won't have you getting hydrophobia.
J.B. You generally get that from dogs.
QUEEN. Oh, from cats too; any cat that a mad dog