Sometimes, if all stories be true, the spectators were fighting with each other before the third round concluded.
The glen was but sparsely dotted with houses even in those days; a number of them inhabited by farmer-weavers, who combined two trades and just managed to live.

One would have a plough, another a horse, and so in Glen Quharity they helped each other.

Without a loom in addition many of them would have starved, and on Saturdays the big farmer and his wife, driving home in a gig, would pass the little farmer carrying or wheeling his wob to Thrums.

When there was no longer a market for the produce of the hand-loom these farms had to be given up, and thus it is that the old school is not the only house in our weary glen around which gooseberry and currant bushes, once tended by careful hands, now grow wild.
In heavy spates the children were conveyed to the old school, as they are still to the new one, in carts, and between it and the dominie's whitewashed dwelling-house swirled in winter a torrent of water that often carried lumps of the land along with it.

This burn he had at times to ford on stilts.
Before the Education Act passed the dominie was not much troubled by the school inspector, who appeared in great splendour every year at Thrums.