in Fife dwelt worthy 'pothy Smith, whose favourite catch was, "I'm not very sure," and he carried his Scots caution so far one day as to answer to a neighbour's call at the shop door in passing, "Are you in, Mr. Smith?" "Well, I'm not very sure."
Feeky, nervously uneasy, used in reference to senile decay, a development of its familiar force peculiar to Cumberland. "Ah was terrible feeky till Ah hard thee fit in t' entry an' saw theh pass t' allen." Here we have the "ayont the hallan" of "The Cottars," where Hawkie was chewing her cud. This was the treviss or partition separating the but room from the ben. The passage crossing it inside the doorway was called the trance in Scotland, not the entry. A clergyman, familiar with our old-fashioned, long, narrow, dark country churches, tickled his hearers when discoursing on St. Peter's vision by saying that he himself had often preached in a trance.
Fowersom, a set of four,—
"An' a' the foursome gat as merry
As tho' they'd drunken sack or sherry."
Though the dalesman prefers wrestling to golfing, we have here aptly visualised many a comfortable party of happy, middle-aged worthies long past the record-breaking stage. Such a foursome was one day holing out at the Ginger-beer hole of St. Andrews Links, when the respective caddies compared notes. To the inquiry, "Hoo's your men gettin' on, Jock?" came the response, "Dod, but they're doin' fine; they hauved the lest hole in fifteen."
Bare Gorp or Gorlin, an unfledged bird: "Geap, Gorbie, an thou'll get a wurm." "As neakt as a gorlin." This is the "raw gorbit" of our unfeeling youth. It recalls a scene, under a spreading hawthorn tree, when I assisted at the beck of a masterful cousin, considerably my senior, in the fitting out of what we thought a braw butcher's shop, the joints and gigots consisting of callow spyugs and nestling mice, perfect Lilliputian piggies. A pleasanter reminiscence is Dr. George Macdonald's exquisite piece about the bonnie, bonnie dell where the yorlin sings, in an early volume of "Good Words for the Young." His yorlin, applied to the yellow-hammer, must be the Cumberland gorlin, turned to another use.
