BOTANICAL WANDERINGS IN THE SOUTH'. 233 



evenings, as they sat chatting round the fire, and he had 

 woven into cloth the yarn thus produced. He then gave a 

 circumstantial account of a practice, in connection with this 

 home manufacture, which gives a vivid glimpse of old- 

 world ways, and which he asserted was once not unusual ; 

 and the narrator was truth itself. 



He said the country lads and lasses used to adjourn to 

 the barn, to talk and joke together, while the girls carried 

 on their primitive spinning with the distaff. To do the 

 whirling most effectively, the chaste young damsels and he 

 insisted strongly that they were so used to take a position 

 half-standing and half-sitting, and give the requisite rotatory 

 motion to the distaff by rolling it on the bare thigh ; as it 

 would not spin half so well on their clothes.* 



" Well, John," said his astonished friend, " I am afraid 

 when next I read about the 'blue, and purple, and fine- 

 twined linen ' of the Jews, it will get mixed up in my mind 

 with this distaff business of yours. Bother it, man, it's 

 outlandish and perfectly heathenish." "Na, na," replied 

 John, " you are quite mista'en ; it was custom, only custom, 

 pure and simple." John then reminded him that they had 

 both lived in a district where men and women forded the 

 Don together in primitive fashion, and where also all heavy 

 fabrics were cleaned by being trodden with the feet in 

 a tub or a stream by kilted women without a single 



possesses a " clew " of worsted obtained from an old woman in the 

 north of Sutherland, who spun it in his presence by means of a distaff, 

 with the usual stone whorl at its end to draw out the twining thread. 



* Mr. James Linn, of the Geological Survey, recently met an old 

 man in the parish of Cairnie near Keith, who had seen this regularly 

 done in his young days, and who said it was a general custom in 

 Banffshire and the north. 



