with the half-dozen lads he hoped to send to college, to whom he
grudged no labour, and on the other gathered the very little ones,
who used to warm their bare feet at the fire, while down the sides
of the room the other scholars sat at their rough old desks, working
sums and copying. Now and then a class came up and did some task,
and at times a boy got the tawse for his negligence, but never a
girl. He kept the girls in as their punishment, with a brother to
take them home, and both had tea in Domsie's house, with a bit of
his best honey, departing much torn between an honest wish to please
Domsie and a pardonable longing for another tea.

"Domsie," as we called the schoolmaster, behind his back in
Drumtochty, because we loved him, was true to the tradition of his
kind, and had an unerring scent for "pairts" in his laddies. He
could detect a scholar in the egg, and prophesied Latinity from a
boy that seemed fit only to be a cowherd. It was believed that he
had never made a mistake in judgment, and it was not his blame if
the embryo scholar did not come to birth. "Five and thirty years
have I been minister at Drumtochty," the Doctor used to say at
school examinations, "and we have never wanted a student at the
University, and while Dominie Jamieson lives we never shall."
Whereupon Domsie took snuff, and assigned his share of credit to the
Doctor, "who gave the finish in Greek to every lad of them, without
money and without price, to make no mention of the higher mathematics."
Seven ministers, four schoolmasters, four doctors, one professor,
and three civil service men had been sent out by the auld schule
in Domsie's time, besides many that "had given themselves to
mercantile pursuits."

He had a leaning to classics and the professions, but Domsie was