5
Hyslop spent in poverty; contentment and devotion.
At the age of eighteen, Tibby was hired at the Candlemas fair, for a great wage, to be byre-woman to Mr Gilbert Forret, then farmer at Drumloche. Tibby had then acquired a great deal of her mother's dangerous bloom—dangerous when attached to poverty, and so much simplicity of heart; and when she came home and told what she had done, her mother and aunty, as she always denominated the two, marvelled much at the extravagant conditions, and began to express some fears regarding her new master's designs, till Tibby put them all to rest by the following piece of simply information.
"Dear, ye ken, ye needna be feared that Mr Forret has ony design o' courting me, for, dear, ye ken, he has a wife already, and five bonny bairns; and he'll never be sae daft as fa' on and court anither ane. I'se warrant he finds ane enow for him, honest man!"
"Oh, then, you are safe enough, since he is a married man, my bairn," said Jane.
The gerse and the dew-cup growing green,
Where a married man and a maid had been?"
said old aunty Douglas; but she spoke always in riddles and mysteries, and there was no more of it. But the truth was, that
