They were a very old family with whom Snecky Hobart, the bellman, lodged¹. Their favorite dissipation, when their looms³ had come to rest, was a dander through the kirk-yard. They dressed for it: the three young ones in their rusty⁴ blacks; the patriarch in his old blue coat, velvet⁵ knee-breeches, and broad blue bonnet⁶; and often of an evening I have met them moving from grave to grave. By this time the old man was nearly ninety, and the young ones averaged sixty. They read out the inscriptions⁷ on the tombstones in a solemn drone, and their father added his reminiscences. He never failed them. Since the beginning of the century he had not missed a funeral, and his children felt that he was a great example. Sire and sons returned from the cemetery⁸ invigorated for their daily labors⁹. If one of them happened to start a dozen yards behind the others, he never thought of making up the distance. If his foot struck against a stone, he came to a dead stop; when he discovered that he had stopped, he set off again.  
A high wall shut off this old family's house and garden, from the clatter¹⁰ of Thrums, a wall that gave Snecky some trouble before he went to live within it. I speak from personal knowledge. One spring morning, before the school-house was built, I was assisting the patriarch to divest¹¹ the gaunt garden pump of its winter suit of straw. I was taking a drink, I remember, my palm over the mouth of the wooden spout¹² and my mouth at the gimlet-hole above, when a leg appeared above the corner of the wall against which the hen-house was built. Two hands followed, clutching desperately¹³ at the uneven¹⁴ stones. Then the leg worked as if it were turning a grindstone, and next moment Snecky was sitting breathlessly on the dyke¹⁵. From this to the hen-house, whose roof was of “divets,” the descent was comparatively easy, and a slanting¹⁶ board allowed the daring bellman to slide thence to the ground. He had come on business, and having talked it over slowly with the old man he turned to depart. Though he was a genteel man, I heard him sigh heavily as, with the remark, “Ay, weel, I'll be movin' again,” he began to rescale the wall. The patriarch, twisted round the pump, made no reply, so I ventured to suggest to the bellman that he might find the gate easier. “Is there a gate?” said Snecky, in surprise at the resources of civilization. I pointed¹⁷ it out to him, and he went his way chuckling¹⁸. The old man told me that he had sometimes wondered at Snecky's mode of approach, but it had not struck him to say anything. Afterward¹⁹, when the bellman took up his abode²⁰ there, they discussed the matter heavily.
 
Hobart inherited both his bell and his nickname from his father, who was not a native of Thrums. He came from some distant part where the people speak of snecking the door, meaning shut it. In Thrums the word used is steek, and sneck seemed to the inhabitants so droll²¹ and ridiculous that Hobart got the name of Snecky. His son left Thrums at the age of ten for the distant farm of Tirl, and did not return until the old bellman's death, twenty years afterward; but the first remark he overheard on entering the kirk-wynd was a conjecture²² flung across the street by a gray-haired crone, that he would be “little Snecky come to bury auld²³ Snecky.”
 
The father had a reputation in his day for “crying” crimes he was suspected of having committed himself, but the Snecky I knew had too high a sense of his own importance for that. On great occasions, such as the loss of little Davy Dundas, or when a tattie roup had to be cried, he was even offensively inflated²⁴: but ordinary announcements, such as the approach of a flying stationer, the roup of a deceased weaver's loom², or the arrival in Thrums of a cart-load of fine “kebec” cheeses, he treated as the merest trifles. I see still the bent²⁶ legs of the snuffy old man straightening to the tinkle²⁷ of his bell, and the smirk²⁸ with which he let the curious populace gather round him. In one hand he ostentatiously displayed the paper on which what he had to cry was written, but, like the minister, he scorned to “read.” With the bell carefully tucked under his oxter he gave forth²⁹ his news in a rasping voice that broke now and again into a squeal³⁰. Though Scotch³¹ in his unofficial conversation, he was believed to deliver himself on public occasions in the finest English. When trotting³² from place to place with his news he carried his bell by the tongue as cautiously as if it were a flagon of milk.
 
Snecky never allowed himself to degenerate³³ into a mere²⁵ machine. His proclamations were provided by those who employed him, but his soul was his own. Having cried a potato roup he would sometimes add a word of warning, such as, “I wudna advise ye, lads, to hae ony-thing to do wi' thae tatties; they're diseased.” Once, just before the cattle market, he was sent round by a local laird to announce that any drover found taking the short cut to the hill through the grounds of Muckle Plowy would be prosecuted³⁴ to the utmost limits of the law. The people were aghast. “Hoots, lads,” Snecky said; “dinna............