Chapter 2 - Page 2

are all being reduced to one dead level,
that character abounds no more and life itself is less interesting,
such things I have read, but I do not believe them. I have even
seen them given as my reason for writing of a past time, and in
that at least there is no truth. In our little town, which is a
sample of many, life is as interesting, as pathetic, as joyous as
ever it was; no group of weavers was better to look at or think
about than the rivulet of winsome girls that overruns our streets
every time the sluice is raised, the comedy of summer evenings and
winter firesides is played with the old zest and every window-blind
is the curtain of a romance. Once the lights of a little town are
lit, who could ever hope to tell all its story, or the story of a
single wynd in it? And who looking at lighted windows needs to
turn to books? The reason my books deal with the past instead of
with the life I myself have known is simply this, that I soon grow
tired of writing tales unless I can see a little girl, of whom my
mother has told me, wandering confidently through the pages. Such
a grip has her memory of her girlhood had upon me since I was a boy
of six.

Those innumerable talks with her made her youth as vivid to me as
my own, and so much more quaint, for, to a child, the oddest of
things, and the most richly coloured picture-book, is that his
mother was once a child also, and the contrast between what she is
and what she was is perhaps the source of all humour. My mother's
father, the one hero of her life, died nine years before I was
born, and I remember this with bewilderment, so familiarly does the
weather-beaten mason's figure rise before me from the old chair on
which I was nursed and now write my books. On the surface he is as
hard as the stone on which he chiselled, and his face is dyed red
by its dust, he is rounded in the shoulders and a 'hoast' hunts him
ever; sooner or later that cough must carry him off, but until then
it shall not keep him from the quarry, nor shall his chapped hands,
as long as they can grasp the mell. It is a night of rain or snow,
and my mother, the little girl in a pinafore who is already his
housekeeper, has been many times to the door to look for him. At
last he draws nigh, hoasting. Or I see him setting off to church,
for he was a great 'stoop' of the Auld Licht kirk, and his mouth is
very firm now as if there were a case of discipline to face, but on
his way home he is bowed with pity. Perhaps his little daughter
who saw him so stern an hour ago does not understand why he
wrestles so long in prayer to-night, or why when he rises from his
knees he presses her to him with unwonted tenderness. Or he is in
this chair repeating to her his favourite poem, 'The