The moon, getting old, and yawning in the middle as if tired of being out so late, set a crumbly horn past the edge of his little skylight. Her straggling, pallid rays fell on something white on Kit's bed. He put out his hand, and it went into a cold wreath of snow up to the wrist.
"I'm comin' to ye," repeated his aunt, "ye lazy, pampered guid-for-naething! Dinna think I canna hear ye grumblin' and speakin' ill words there!"
Yet all he had said was "Ouch!"--in the circumstances, a somewhat natural remark.
Kit took the corner of the scanty coverlet and, with a well-accustomed arm-sweep, sent the whole swirl of snow over the end of his bed, getting across the side at the same time himself. He did not complain. All he said, as he blew upon his hands and slapped them against his sides, was--
"Michty, it'll be cauld at the turnip-pits this mornin'!"
It had been snowing in the night since Kit lay down, and the snow had sifted in through the open tiles of the farmhouse of Loch Spellanderie. That was nothing. It often did that. But sometimes it rained, and that was worse. Yet Kit Kennedy did not much mind even that. He had a cunning arrangement in old umbrellas and corn-sacks that could beat the rain any day. Snow, in his own words, he did not give a "buckie"[5] for.
[Footnote 5: The fruit of the dog-rose is, when large and red, locally called a "buckie."]
Then there was a stirring on the floor, a creaking of the ancient joists. It was Kit putting on his clothes. He always knew where each article lay--dark or shine, it made no matter to him. He had not an embarrassment of apparel. He had a suit for wearing, and his "other clothes." These latter were, however, now too small for him, and so he could not go to the kirk at Duntochar. But his aunt had laid them aside for her son Rob, a growing lad. She was a thoughtful, provident woman.
"Be gettin' doon the stair, my man, and look slippy," cried his aunt, as a parting shot, "and see carefully to the kye. It'll be as weel for ye."
Kit had on his trousers by this time. His waistcoat followed. But before he put on his coat he knelt down to say his prayer. He had promised his mother to say it then. If he put on his coat he was apt to forget, in his haste to get out-of-doors where the beasts were friendly. So between his waistcoat and his coat he prayed. The angels were up at the time, and they heard, and went and told the Father who hears prayer. They said that in a garret at a hill-farm a boy was praying with his knees in a snow-drift--a boy without father or mother.