106 KENNIE'S MASTERr-ANDREW MEIKLE. I'AKT VII. 



improvements of their neighbours. " Saltoun barley " 

 was the name by which dressed pot-barley then became 

 known, and it continued to preserve the name long 

 after barley-mills had come into general use. James 

 Meikle was equally successful in setting liffi fanners to 

 work ; but they had a good deal of superstitious preju- 

 dice to encounter, the country people looking upon the 

 grain cleaned by them with suspicion, as procured by 

 " artificially-created wind." The clergy even argued 

 that " winds were raised by God alone, and it was irre- 

 ligious in man to attempt to raise wind for himself, and 

 by efforts of his own ;" and one clergyman even refused 

 the holy communion to those of his parishioners who 

 thus irreverently raised " Devil's wind." The readers of 

 i Old Mortality ' will remember Mause Headrigg's indig- 

 nation when it was proposed that her " son Cuddie should 

 work in the barn wi' a new-fangled machine for dightin' 

 the corn frae the chaff, thus impiously thwarting the will 

 of Divine Providence by raising wind for your leddy- 

 ship's ain particular use by human art, instead of soliciting 

 it by prayer, or waiting patiently for whatever dispensa- 

 tion of wind Providence was pleased to send upon the 

 shealing-hill." Scott, however, was obviously guilty of 

 an anachronism in this passage, for the first pair of 

 fanners was not set up at Saltoun until the year 1720 

 long after the period of Cuddie Headrigg's supposed 

 trial and it was not until seventeen years later that 

 another winnowing-machine was set up in the neigh- 

 bouring shire of Roxburgh, and employed as an ordinary 

 agency in farming operations. 



Andrew Meikle was the only surviving son of 

 Fletcher's millwright, and like him was an ingenious 

 mechanic. He had married and settled at Houston Mill, 

 on Mr. Rennie's Phantassie estate, where he combined 

 the occupations of small farmer, miller, and millwright. 

 He had himself fitted up the machinery of the mill, of 

 which he was the tenant ; and adjoining it was his mill- 



