68 JOHN DUNCAN, WEAVER AND BOTANIST. 



experiences from Drumlithie to Aberdeen had given him 

 full insight into all sorts of work connected with his trade, 

 both linen and woollen ; so that he was now prepared to 

 execute skilfully any kind of cloth he might be called upon 

 to make. 



Understand precisely, good reader, what kind of weaver 

 John Duncan was now to become ; for during the greater 

 part of his life, he was an example of survival, which gives 

 him additional interest. In this respect, as in many others, 

 "old times were breathing there," with him, as with 

 Wordsworth's Roman matron in humble life. He entered 

 a class, now exceedingly rare in Scotland, though for 

 generations, before the steam-engine and kindred inven- 

 tions had extinguished so much of the past, universal in 

 the country. They wove what was known as " home- 

 made " or " hame'art-made " cloth, from the materials 

 being prepared in the homes of the people, as distinguished 

 from the manufactured goods of the factories ; and they 

 were therefore designated "home" and "country" and 

 " customer " weavers. 



In the olden days, when each parish, hamlet and glen 

 had to be largely self-dependent and self-producing as to 

 food, clothing and other needs of life, the weaver was as 

 necessary a personage in the community as the smith and 

 the carpenter, the minister and the schoolmaster. The 

 father and sons sheared the sheep of the wool ; the daughters 

 prepared and spun it into thread at the birring wheel, and 

 the thrifty mother, in the intervals of household work, 

 either wove it into cloth herself (facts that still survive in 

 the fine old words "spinster" and "wife"), or sent it to the 

 weaver, called then by the nearly obsolete term of "webster " 



