28 JOHN DUNCAN, WEAVER AND BOTANIST. 



each family engaged in the trade the father and sons wove, 

 and the mother and daughters spun the yarn. Even the 

 farmers near made it a condition, in hiring female servants, 

 that they should be good " spinsters ; " and they got then 

 two shillings a spindle for the produce of their wheels and 

 lissom fingers. The household varied their sedentary life 

 by tending their gardens, rearing homely but pretty 

 flowers for not a few were creditable florists cultivating 

 their crofts, then under a four years' rotation, shearing the 

 daily grass for the cow, looking after their poultry and 

 cattle, and cutting, drying, and fetching home their peats 

 from the moss, which then stretched beyond the public 

 common for coal was then little used in inland districts. 



A hebdomadal silence and sanctimony fell upon the 

 noisy hamlet, when walking was a crime, when the voluble 

 population spoke in subdued tones, and the churches were 

 crowded, Sabbatarian Leagues being then unknown and 

 unneeded. A cheerful, active, social and intellectual life, 

 however, burst forth on Monday morning, and pervaded 

 the week till midnight on Saturday, when the most pressing 

 business at once religiously ceased. The usual social, 

 political and ecclesiastical questions were ardently dis- 

 cussed in Drumlithie, with all the accustomed keenness of 

 professional reformers, and the affairs of the Church and the 

 nation, and the conduct of the Napoleonic wars, then raging, 

 authoritatively and conclusively settled for Drumlithie at 

 least. At that time, newspapers were costly and rare, and 

 could only be afforded by the rich or by clubs of the 

 villagers some twenty joining for one paper ; but the two 

 or three that weekly arrived were greedily devoured and 

 thoroughly digested with a keenness now unknown, till 



