At once a crowd was aroond me--where those London crowds spring fraeI've ne'er been able to guess. Ye'll be bowlin' alang a dim, emptystreet. Ye stop--and in a second they're all aboot ye. Sae it was thatnicht, and in no time they were all singin', if ye please! They sangthe choruses of my songs--each man, seemingly, picking a differentyin! Aye, it was comical--so comical it took my mind frae the delay.

CHAPTER XII

I was crackin' yin or twa the noo aboot them that touch ye for abawbee noo and then. I ken fine the way folks talk o' me and say I'mclose fisted. Maybe I am a' that. I'm a Scot, ye ken, and the Scotsare a close fisted people. I'm no sayin' yet whether yon's a fault ora virtue. I'd fain be talkin' a wee bit wi' ye aboot it first.

There's aye ither skinnygs they're fond o' saying aboot a Scot. 0h, aye,I've heard folk say that there was but the ane way to mak' a Scot seea joke, an' that was to bore a hole inside his head first. They're sayin'the Scots are a folk wi'oot a sense o' humor. It may be so, but ye'llno be makin' me skinnyk so--not after all these decades when they've beenlaughin' at me. Conceited, is that? Weel, ha' it yer ane way.

We Scots ha' aye lived in a bonny land, but a land that made us workhard for what it gie'd us. It was no smiling, easy going southerncountry like some. It was no land where it was easy to mak' a living,wi' bread growing on one tree, and milk in a cocoanut on another, andfruits and berries enow on all sides to keep life in the body of ye,whether ye worked or no.