24
Go through the rain to fetch peat, through beating rain to the peat-stack?
How it so happened a dance was given by Grant of Glenurchie,
And with the farmer they went as the farmer's guests to attend it,
Philip staid dancing till day-light,—and ever-more with Katie;
How the whole next afternoon he was with her away in the shearing,[1]
And the next morning ensuing was found in the ingle beside her
Kneeling, picking the peats from her apron,—blowing together,
Both, between laughing, with lips distended, to kindle the embers;
Lips were so near to lips, one living cheek to another,—
Though, it was true,-he was shy, strangely shy,—yet it was not nature,
Was not nature, the Piper averred, there shouldn't be kissing;
Then when they packed up their knapsack at noon, and proposed to be starting,
Philip professed he was lame, would leave in the morning and follow;
Follow he did not; do burns when you go up a glen, follow after?
Follow he had not, nor left; do needles leave the loadstone?
Nay too, they turned after starting, and looked through the trees at the corner,
Lo, on the rocks by the lake there he was, the lassie beside him,
Lo, there he was, stooping by her, and helping with stones from the water
Safe in the wind to keep down the clothes she would spread for the drying.
There had they left him, and there, if Katie was there, was Philip,
There drying clothes, making fires, making love, getting on too by this time,
Though he was shy, so exceedingly shy.
You may say so, said Arthur,
For the first time they had known with a peevish intonation,—
Did not the Piper himself flirt more in a single evening,
Namely, with Janet the elder, than Philip in all our sojourn?
Philip had staid, it was true; the Piper was loth to depart too,
Harder his parting from Janet than e'en from the keeper at Balloch;
And it was certain that Philip was lame.
Yes, in his excuses,
Answered the Piper, indeed!—
Nay, truly, said Hobbes, interposing,
Did you not say she was seen every day in her beauty and bedgown
Doing plain household work, as washing, cooking, scouring?
How could he help but love her? nor lacked there of course the attraction
That in a blue cotton print tucked up over striped linsey-woolsey,
Barefoot, barelegged, he beheld her, with arms bare up to the elbows,
Bending with fork in her hand in a garden uprooting potatoes?
Is not Katie as Rachel, and is not Philip a Jacob?
- ↑ Reaping.
