and she had here asked a broad question, and there she had thrown out an innuendo, and there again she had gradually led on to a conversation on the subject of poor Mysie. And from all inquiries and investigations she had collected, that Mysie was a dark-eyed, laughter-loving wench, with cherry-cheeks, and a skin as white as her father's finest bolted flour, out of which was made the abbot's own wastel-bread. For her temper, she sang and laughed from morning to night; and for her fortune, a material article, besides that which the miller might have amassed by means of his proverbial golden thumb, Mysie was to inherit a good handsome lump of land, with a prospect of the mill and mill-acres descending to her husband on an easy lease, if a fair word were spoken in season to the abbot, and to the prior, and to the sub-prior, and to the sacristan, and so forth.
By turning and again turning these advantages over in her own mind, Elspeth at length came to be of opinion that the only way to save her son Halbert from a life of 'spur, spear, and snaffle', as they called that of the border-riders, from the dint of a clothyard shaft, or the loop of an inch-cord, was that he should marry and settle, and that Mysie Happer should be his destined bride.
As if to her wish, Hob Miller arrived on his strong-built mare, bearing on a pillion behind him the lovely Mysie, with cheeks like a peony-rose (if Dame Glendinning had ever seen one), spirits all afloat with rustic coquetry, and a profusion of hair as black as ebony. The beau idéal which Dame Glendinning had been bodying forth in her imagination, became unexpectedly realized in the buxom form of Mysie Happer, whom, in the course of half an hour, she settled upon as the maiden who was to fix the restless and untutored Halbert. True, Mysie, as the dame soon saw, was like to love dancing round a May-pole as well as managing a domestic establishment, and Halbert was like to break more heads than he would grind stacks of corn. But then a miller should always be of manly make, and has been described so since the days of Chaucer and James I.[1]
- ↑ The verse we have chosen for a motto is from a poem imputed to James I of Scotland. As for the miller who figures among the Canterbury pilgrims, besides his sword and buckler, he boasted other attributes,
