could not keep goin' any more, lacking the help of the boys,
though she had worked her fingers to the bone. "Surely it's a crool
job, Mr Amos," she says, "that the Goavernment should tak baith
my laddies, and I'll maybe never see them again, and let the Irish
gang free and tak the bread frae our mouth. At the gasworks across
the road they took on a hundred Irish last week, and every yin o'
them as young and well set up as you would ask to see. And my
wee Davie, him that's in Germany, had aye a weak chest, and
Jimmy was troubled wi' a bowel complaint. That's surely no
justice!". ...'

He broke off and lit a match by drawing it across the seat of his
trousers. 'It's time I got the gas lichtit. There's some men coming
here at half-ten.'

As the gas squealed and flickered in the lighting, he sketched for me
the coming guests. 'There's Macnab and Niven, two o' my colleagues.
And there's Gilkison of the Boiler-fitters, and a lad Wilkie - he's got
consumption, and writes wee bits in the papers. And there's a queer
chap o' the name o' Tombs - they tell me he comes frae Cambridge,
and is a kind of a professor there - anyway he's more stuffed wi'
havers than an egg wi' meat. He telled me he was here to get at the
heart o' the workingman, and I said to him that he would hae to look a
bit further than the sleeve o' the workin'-man's jaicket. There's no
muckle in his head, poor soul. Then there'll be Tam Norie, him that
edits our weekly paper - _Justice _for _All. Tam's a humorist and great on
Robert Burns, but he hasna the balance o' a dwinin' teetotum ... Ye'll
understand, Mr Brand, that I keep my mouth shut in such company,
and don't express my own views more than is absolutely necessary. I
criticize whiles, and that gives me a name of whunstane common-sense,