CHAPTER XIX. 



OTHER FRIENDS OF THE WEAVER AT NETHERTON. 



DURING Duncan's thirteen years' stay in the parish of 

 Tough, his life was spent chiefly in and round Netherton, 

 where his home and workshop were, and to that hamlet 

 and its immediate vicinity his personal friends were mostly 

 confined. Never much given to the cultivation of barren 

 socialities, his intellectual pursuits had always made him 

 greatly independent of external excitements and the 

 pleasures of mere acquaintanceship ; while his new botanical 

 enthusiasm and its consequent ramblings tended to make 

 him still more self-contained and solitary. Hence his 

 friends in the district were comparatively few, and they were 

 chiefly found amongst those of similar tastes in science, 

 theology, or politics. In this way, also, he failed to be 

 intimate with several persons then in the parish who 

 possessed intellectual tastes, but of a different kind from his 

 own. But the friends he had were much attached to him, 

 and with them he was content. 



One of these was the schoolmaster at Coulterneuk,* or 

 Newbigging, a little north of Whitehouse station. He was 

 an intelligent, well-informed man ; a great reader, being one 

 * Called Cooterneuk. 



