168 Notes and Sketches. 



with a remnant of respectability more or less, about 

 them, carrying multitudinous meal pocks and other 

 receptacles, and pretty sure of an " awmous," or night 

 quarters where asked. Then there was the inferior herd 

 of beggars creatures who would whine and invoke 

 numberless blessings on your head when they appealed 

 to your feelings of pity, on the ground of infirmities or 

 afflictions real or feigned, and on finding the appeal 

 to be in vain, would turn and curse you to your face 

 with amazing goodwill and volubility. 



As a sorner, the true caird differed considerably from 

 either of the two classes of "peer fowk." He knew he 

 had no pretensions to the standing of the one, and he 

 scorned to demean himself to the level of the other. The 

 pronounced caird hardly deemed it necessary to approach 

 you with a whine ; an unshrinking and. it might be, 

 insolent demand suited his temper better ; and the 

 remark applies not to the male caird alone. When a 

 marriage, a funeral, or other "occasion" occurred, at 

 which meat and drink would be supplied in quantity, the 

 cairds seldom failed to get wind of it, and as seldom to 

 put in appearance with the express object of sharing in 

 the good things going. It was no easy matter to satisfy a 

 horde of some twenty, thirty, or more of these rapacious 

 and lawless beings in the way of either meat or drink ; 

 and not unfrequently people who wished to save 

 themselves from the insolent and endless onsets of 

 the whole crew, made a compact with some guiding 

 spirit, who undertook, on being provided with so 

 much as a general booty and something in the shape 

 of a personal consideration, to keep the whole body in 

 order. One of the last of the class of unmitigated 

 Aberdeenshire cairds, of caird descent, and herself a 

 " survival" from a past generation, was Lizzie Eraser, 

 who died not very many years ago ; a woman of mas- 

 culine proportions, with a voice of such grating rough- 

 ness as was well fitted to startle the listener on find- 

 ing it owned by one clad in female habiliments. Lizzie 



