For when her friend was comforting her in illness, by the hopes that she
would, after winter, enjoy again some of their country spring butter,
she exclaimed, without the slightest idea of being guilty of any
irreverence, "Spring butter! by that time I shall be buttering in
heaven." When really dying, and when friends were round her bed she
overheard one of them saying to another, "Her face has lost its colour;
it grows like a sheet of paper." The quaint spirit even then broke out
in the remark, "Then I'm sure it maun be _broon_ paper." A very
strong-minded lady of the class, and, in Lord Cockburn's language,
"indifferent about modes and habits[59]," had been asking from a lady
the character of a cook she was about to hire. The lady naturally
entered a little upon her moral qualifications, and described her as a
very decent woman; the response to which was, "Oh, d--n her decency; can
she make good collops?"--an answer which would somewhat surprise a lady
of Moray Place now, if engaged in a similar discussion of a
servant's merits.
The Rev. Dr. Cook of Haddington supplies an excellent anecdote, of which
the point is in the dry Scottish answer: An old lady of the Doctor's
acquaintance, about seventy, sent for her medical attendant to consult
him about a sore throat, which had troubled her for some days. Her
medical man was ushered into her room, decked out with the now
prevailing fashion, a mustache and flowing beard.
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