While these things passed through my mind rapidly, I heard my friend beneath recommence, for the third time, the air from which his own name had been probably adopted, when he was interrupted by his rustic auditors.
‘If thou canst play no other spring but that, mon, ho hadst best put up ho’s pipes and be jogging. Squoire will be back anon, or Master Nixon, and we’ll see who will pay poiper then.’
Oho, thought I, if I have no sharper ears than those of my friends Jan and Dorcas to encounter, I may venture an experiment upon them; and, as most expressive of my state of captivity, I sang two or three lines of the 137th Psalm--
The country people listened with attention, and when I ceased, I heard them whisper together in tones of commiseration, ‘Lack-a-day, poor soul! so pretty a man to be beside his wits!’
‘An he be that gate,’ said Wandering Willie, in a tone calculated to reach my ears, ‘I ken naething will raise his spirits like a spring.’ And he struck up, with great vigour and spirit, the lively Scottish air, the words of which instantly occurred to me--
Oh whistle and I’ll come t’ye, my lad, Oh whistle and I’ll come t’ye, my lad; Though father and mother and a’ should gae mad, Oh whistle and I’ll come t’ye, my lad.
I soon heard a clattering noise of feet in the courtyard, which I concluded to be Jan and Dorcas dancing a jig in their Cumberland wooden clogs. Under cover of this din, I endeavoured to answer Willie’s signal by whistling, as loud as I could---
Come back again and loe me When a’ the lave are gane.
He instantly threw the dancers out, by changing his air to
There’s my thumb, I’ll ne’er beguile thee.
I no longer doubted that a communication betwixt us was happily established, and that, if I had an opportunity of speaking to the poor musician, I should find him willing to take my letter to the post, to invoke the assistance of some active magistrate, or of the commanding-officer of Carlisle Castle, or, in short, to do whatever else I could point out, in the compass of his power, to contribute to my liberation. But to obtain speech of him, I must have run the risk of alarming the suspicions of Dorcas, if not of her yet more stupid Corydon. My ally’s blindness prevented his receiving any communication by signs from the window--even if I could have ventured to make them, consistently with prudence--so that notwithstanding the mode of intercourse we had adopted was both circuitous and peculiarly liable to misapprehension, I saw nothing I could do better than to continue it, trusting my own and my correspondent’s acuteness in applying to the airs the meaning they were intended to convey. I thought of singing the words themselves of some significant song, but feared I might, by doing so, attract suspicion. I endeavoured, therefore, to intimate my speedy departure from my present place of residence, by whistling the well-known air with which festive parties in Scotland usually conclude the dance:--