The first sign of it was that he swept all his business garments
unceremoniously on to the floor. The next that he rootled at the
bottom of a deep drawer and extracted a most disreputable tweed suit.
It had once been what I believe is called a Lovat mixture, but was
now a nondescript sub-fusc, with bright patches of colour like
moss on whinstone. He regarded it lovingly, for it had been for
twenty years his holiday wear, emerging annually for a hallowed month
to be stained with salt and bleached with sun. He put it on,
and stood shrouded in an odour of camphor. A pair of thick nailed
boots and a flannel shirt and collar completed the equipment of
the sportsman. He had another long look at himself in the glass,
and then descended whistling to breakfast. This time the tune was
"Macgregors' Gathering," and the sound of it stirred the grimy lips
of a man outside who was delivering coals--himself a Macgregor--to
follow suit. Mr McCunn was a very fountain of music that morning.

Tibby, the aged maid, had his newspaper and letters waiting by his
plate, and a dish of ham and eggs frizzling near the fire. He fell
to ravenously but still musingly, and he had reached the stage of
scones and jam before he glanced at his correspondence. There was a
letter from his wife now holidaying at the Neuk Hydropathic.
She reported that her health was improving, and that she had met
various people who had known somebody else whom she had once
known herself. Mr. McCunn read the dutiful pages and smiled.
"Mamma's enjoying herself fine," he observed to the teapot.
He knew that for his wife the earthly paradise was a hydropathic,
where she put on her afternoon dress and every jewel she possessed
when she rose in the morning, ate large meals of which the novelty
atoned for the nastiness, and collected an immense casual
acquaintance, with whom she discussed ailments, ministers, sudden