"It mak's
the hoose ever so much mair heartsome."
"So it is," would come the reply. "It's a fine, but cheerie thing.
You're a rale weel-aff woman, I can tell ye," and the woman would go
home to dream of one day having a room like Mrs. Sinclair's, and to tell
her neighbors of the great "grandeur" that the Sinclair's possessed,
whilst Nellie would set to, and rub and polish those drawers and that
mirror, and the stuff-bottomed chairs till they shone like the sun upon
a moorland tarn, and she herself felt like dropping from sheer
exhaustion.
She even took to telling the neighbors sometimes, when they came on
those visits that "working folk should a' hae coal-houses, for coal kept
ablow the beds makes an awfu' mess o' the ticks."
"Oh, weel," would be the reply, made with the usual sigh of resignation,
"I hae had a house a gey lang while now, an' I dinna think I've ever
wanted ony sic newfangled things as that."
"That's what's wrang," Mrs. Sinclair would reply. "We dinna want them.
If we did, we'd soon get them. What way would the gentry hae a' thae
things, an' us hae nane?"
"That's a' richt, Nellie," would be the reply. "We wadna ken what to do
wi' what the gentry has got.
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