Angels Ministers | Page 3

him as I have, Ma'am: only about
politics, and poetry, and things like that, where, maybe, he knows a bit
more than I do (though he didn't know his Burns so well as a man
ought that thinks to make laws for Scotland!). But to hear him talking
about natural facts, you'd think he was just inventing for to amuse
himself! Do you know, Ma'am, he thought stags had white tails like
rabbits, and that 'twas only when they wagged them so as to show, that
you could shoot them. And he thought that you 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