Summers and Winters at Balmwhapple (Volume 1); By the North Sea (Abridged, Paperback, Abridged edition)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896. Excerpt: ... IN THE YEAR ONE: THE STORY OF THE CROOKIT MEG. HERE are Holdfasts outside the parish of Balma whapple; and those who have read a certain volume of essays in romance may remember Martin and Stephen, --Martin who loved May Marvel, and Stephen who was cast out of the Church of Christ by Brass and Butterwell for heresy. Both Martin and Stephen have been gathered to their fathers, and the place that knew them knows them no more. R. I. P. But I am told that the reminiscences of another branch of the Holdfasts, which originally appeared in the Tomahawk, is no longer to be had for love or money, and I have been entreated to tell the story again for the benefit of the generation which has grown up since it was written. I am loath to part with the homely friends of fifty years ago, and if I could only succeed in making them visible to younger eyes, I should feel that I had not wholly failed. We have nothing like them now; and yet they did not seem strange to us at the time. Balmawhapple was very cheery in those days; I don't think there were quite so many "fads" going, and men and women were less serious than they are now. It is perhaps as well that they are gone; the Temperance people would have been scandalised by the Provost's punch-bowl, which, if I am not mistaken, was known far and wide as the Bullers-of-Buchan (and indeed it was wellnigh as deep); and I am afraid a free-thinking and whistloving Doctor of Divinity would have run a grievous risk of being deposed by the ecclesiastical courts for habits unbefitting a minister of the Kirk. This then is my Balmawhapple story of the year One--severely abridged. I. It was the year One--the first year of a century which has passed the Psalmist's threescore-and-ten. Seventy and odd years have played sad havoc with most...