Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Autobiography of a Working Man
He found my mother a young blooming woman at or in the vicinity of Ayton - a pretty village as you will say if you ever see it. She was a servant in a farmhouse previous to marriage, and the daughter of John Orkney, a working man. She had a female ancestor, reputed as a witch, who is still remembered for her sayings and doings. People in Ayton to this day, to justify some thing unusual said or done by themselves, add to it, As old Eppy Orkney said, or, As old Eppy Orkney did. Perhaps my progenitors who lived nearer to her time than I, did not feel much honour in Eppy's reputa tion for witchcraft. But for myself I confess to have always had a veneration for this, the only one of my progenitors who was in any way distinguished above the common level of men and women. I have no doubt that she was a woman of superior energy and intellect, whom narrower minds around her could not comprehend. Had she been remarkable only for her weakness of mind, her sayings and doings would have perished with her or soon after her.
My parents being a careful pair, began housekeeping with a good stock of furniture. But I have heard them tell of the wretched hovel of a house they lived in. The houses of the labourers in the south of Scotland are generally only sheds to this day, even most of those newly built; but they were much worse then. My father and mother had a window (the house had none) consisting of one small pane of glass, and when they moved from one house to another in different parts of Berwickshire in different years, they carried this window with them, and had it fixed in each hovel into which they went as tenants.
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