Avoiding the many nets extended long and wide on the grassy sands,
the youth walked through the tide swollen mouth of the river, and
passed along the front of the village until he arrived at a house,
the small window in the seaward gable of which was filled with a
curious collection of things for sale--dusty looking sweets in
a glass bottle; gingerbread cakes in the shape of large hearts,
thickly studded with sugar plums of rainbow colours, invitingly
poisonous; strings of tin covers for tobacco pipes, overlapping each
other like fish scales; toys, and tapes, and needles, and twenty
other kinds of things, all huddled together.
Turning the corner of this house, he went down the narrow passage
between it and the next, and in at its open door. But the moment
it was entered it lost all appearance of a shop, and the room with
the tempting window showed itself only as a poor kitchen with an
earthen floor.
"Weel, hoo did the pipes behave themsels the day, daddy?" said the
youth as he strode in.
"Och, she'll pe peing a coot poy today," returned the tremulous
voice of a grey headed old man, who was leaning over a small peat
fire on the hearth, sifting oatmeal through the fingers of his left
hand into a pot, while he stirred the boiling mess with a short
stick held in his right.
It had grown to be understood between them that the pulmonary
conditions of the old piper should be attributed not to his internal,
but his external lungs--namely, the bag of his pipes.
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