Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush | Page 2

map-cases, and a thermometer to be kept at
not less than 58° and not more than 62°, and ventilators which the
Inspector is careful to examine. When I stumbled in last week the
teacher was drilling the children in Tonic Sol-fa with a little
harmonium, and I left on tiptoe.
It is difficult to live up to this kind of thing, and my thoughts drift to
the auld schule-house and Domsie. Some one with the love of God in
his heart had built it long ago, and chose a site for the bairns in the
sweet pine-woods at the foot of the cart road to Whinnie Knowe and
the upland farms. It stood in a clearing with the tall Scotch firs round
three sides, and on the fourth a brake of gorse and bramble bushes,
through which there was an opening to the road. The clearing was the
playground, and in summer the bairns annexed as much wood as they
liked, playing tig among the trees, or sitting down at dinner-time on the
soft, dry spines that made an elastic carpet everywhere. Domsie used to
say there were two pleasant sights for his old eyes every day. One was
to stand in the open at dinner-time and see the flitting forms of the
healthy, rosy sonsie bairns in the wood, and from the door in the
afternoon to watch the schule skail till each group was lost in the kindly
shadow, and the merry shouts died away in this quiet place. Then the
Dominie took a pinch of snuff and locked the door, and went to his
house beside the school. One evening I came on him listening
bare-headed to the voices, and he showed so kindly that I shall take him
as he stands. A man of middle height, but stooping below it, with sandy
hair turning to grey, and bushy eye-brow covering keen, shrewd grey
eyes. You will notice that his linen is coarse but spotless, and that,

though his clothes are worn almost threadbare, they are well brushed
and orderly. But you will be chiefly arrested by the Dominie's coat, for
the like of it was not in the parish. It was a black dress coat, and no
man knew when it had begun its history; in its origin and its
continuance it resembled Melchisedek. Many were the myths that
gathered round that coat, but on this all were agreed, that without it we
could not have realised the Dominie, and it became to us the sign and
trappings of learning. He had taken a high place at the University, and
won a good degree, and I've heard the Doctor say that he had a career
before him. But something happened in his life, and Domsie buried
himself among the woods with the bairns of Drumtochty. No one knew
the story, but after he died I found a locket on his breast, with a proud,
beautiful face within, and I have fancied it was a tragedy. It may have
been in substitution that he gave all his love to the children, and nearly
all his money too, helping lads to college, and affording an
inexhaustible store of peppermints for the little ones.
Perhaps one ought to have been ashamed of that school-house, but yet
it had its own distinction, for scholars were born there, and now and
then to this day some famous man will come and stand in the deserted
playground for a space. The door was at one end, and stood open in
summer, so that the boys saw the rabbits come out from their holes on
the edge of the wood, and birds sometimes flew in unheeded. The
fireplace was at the other end, and was fed in winter with the sticks and
peats brought by the scholars. On one side Domsie sat with the
half-dozen lads he hoped to send to college, to whom he grudged no
labour, and on the other gathered the very little ones, who used to warm
their bare feet at the fire, while down the sides of the room the other
scholars sat at their rough old desks, working sums and copying. Now
and then a class came up and did some task, and at times a boy got the
tawse for his negligence, but never a girl. He kept the girls in as their
punishment, with a brother to take them home, and both had tea in
Domsie's house, with a bit of his best honey, departing much torn
between an honest wish to please Domsie and a pardonable longing for
another tea.
"Domsie," as we called the schoolmaster, behind his back in

Drumtochty, because we loved him, was true to the tradition of his kind,
and had an unerring scent for "pairts" in his laddies. He could detect