Читать книгу The Primrose Path: A Chapter in the Annals of the Kingdom of Fife онлайн

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“What are you doing?” she cried; “do you call that doing onything—drawing a crookit line with a pencil and filling it up with paint? Paint! ye might paint the auld cart if that’s the trade you mean to follow. It would aye be worth a shilling or twa, which is mair than ever thae scarts and splashes will be.” Or when Rob escaped into the seclusion of a book: “Read, oh ay, ye can read fast enough when it’s for naething but diversion and to pass the time; but ye’ll ne’er gather bawbees with your reading, nor be a credit to them that belong to you.” This was the sting of the whole. He was no credit to those who belonged to him, rather he was an implied shame; for who would believe, Mrs. Glen asked, that this sudden return was by his own will? “Na, na,” she said, “they’ll think it is for ill-doing, and that he’s turned away out of the college. It’s what I would do mysel’. And to think of all I’ve done, and all I’ve put up with, and a’ to come to naething! Eh, man! I would soon, soon have put an end to your douts. I would have made ye sure of ae thing, if it hadna been your uncle Robert and his ministers, ye should hae had nae douts about that: that no idle lad should sit at my fireside and devour the best o’ everything. If ye had the heart of a mouse ye couldna do it. Me, I would starve first; me, I would sweep the streets. I would go down a coal-pit, or work in a gawley chain afore I would sorn on my ain mother, a widow-woman, and eat her out o’ house and hame!”