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ROAMINT IN THE GLOAMIN' 37
break the tow in its passage from the machine to the bag or the tin. When one receptacle was filled, carefully pressed down in coils or layers, another took its place and so the job went on, changeless and mechanical, all day. The only relief came by thinking that tomorrow there would be no work to do and that school, even under such a schoolmaster as Auld "Stumpie" Bell, was far, far better than handling an endless film of tow from six till six.
There were perhaps fifty half-timers in Gordon's. Their educational requirements were attended to by the said Mr. Bell, a "character" if ever there existed one among the dominies of Scotland. He was a little man with a shrivelled leg so much shorter than the other than he wore an iron standard on his boot. This certainly brought both limbs on something like equality for length but I always thought that the leg with the ironwork attached to it was easily the more useful of the two ! Because he used it with deadly effect upon my anatomy more than once ! My first impressions of "Stumpie" — the nick-name was, of course, inspired by his infirmity — were that he regarded each and every one of his pupils as a child of Satan, choke-full of the most terrible kind of original sin. He was the sternest disciplinarian I have ever come across in my life. He ruled us with a rod — and a foot ! — of iron. Only the slightest provocation roused his temper and it was God help the poor kid who came under the storm of his wrath. He walloped the life out of us boys day in and day out. But we loved him. He was just. He was hard but he was fair. And he earned the respect of every boy who passed through his drastic curriculum.
Curiously enough, his educational ideas were pretty much on a par with those of Mr. Fraser, the Musselburgh teacher of whom I have already written. Not because he believed implicitly in the "fundamentals" — the good old three R's again — but because he was another fervent Scot to whom the rest of the world didn't matter. Scottish history meant far