present as fetch and carry, and he used to tell Tommy that this position
would be his as soon as he could sneer sufficiently at the old hats.
When gentlemen come into the shop and buy a new hat, he explained, they
put it on, meaning to tell you to send the old one to their address, and
the art of being a fashionable hatter lies in this: you must be able to
curl your lips so contemptuously at the old hat that they tell you
guiltily to keep it, as they have no further use for it. Then they
retire ashamed of their want of moral courage and you have made an extra
half-guinea.

"But I aye snort," young Petey admitted, "and it should be done without
a sound." When he graduated, he was to marry Martha Spens, who was
waiting for him at Tillyloss. There was a London seamstress whom he
preferred, and she was willing, but it is safest to stick to Thrums.

When Tommy was among his new friends a Scotch word or phrase often
escaped his lips, but old Petey and the others thought he had picked it
up from them, and would have been content to accept him as a London waif
who lived somewhere round the corner. To trick people so simply,
however, is not agreeable to an artist, and he told them his name was
Tommy Shovel, and that his old girl walloped him, and his father found
dogs, all which inventions Thrums Street accepted as true. What is much
more noteworthy is that, as he gave them birth, Tommy half believed them
also, being already the best kind of actor.

Not all the talking was done by Tommy when he came home with news, for
he seldom mentioned a Thrums name, of which his mother could not tell
him something more. But sometimes she did not choose to tell, as when he
announced that a certain Elspeth Lindsay, of the Marywellbrae, was dead.
After this she ceased to listen, for old Elspeth had been her