Chapter VII: The Mouse Miller

In the olden times, the city of Perth was a dour city, even when the sun shone, for the houses were tall and narrow and sad colored, and little and crumbling, and the streets were narrow, too, and muddy. But when the winter’s mist blows in from the north seas and December’s sleets begin, then it is a very cold and dreary place, indeed.

So young David found it one winter’s morning, when the night mail had galloped and creaked and snorted up to the door of the Boar’s Head Inn. His father had just passed away in Dunfermline, leaving but a hut, an acre, and a cow; and his mother, having much ado to find food for herself and the cow, sent David, a gawk of a lad of sixteen, to Perth to a cousin, of whom, save for his name and trade and the memory of a fairing with him when she was as young as her son, she knew nothing. So young David, when he got out of the coach, had no notion as to where he should go.

A servant stood at the door of the Boar’s Head, holding it open for the travelers, and from the icy pavement David glimpsed a bright fire, a neatly sanded floor, and a counter with shining bottles and plates of smoking hot food set out on it. But, having only a few pence, he was afraid to go in, and was turning away with his bundle over his shoulder, when the man cried:

“In wi’ ye, lad! and have a hot cup of tea and an oat-cake for a penny.”

So David, thus encouraged, went inside and stole into the chimney-corner to sit on a great settle, where he was soon warm and cozy, with his earthen mug of steaming tea and a well buttered oat-cake to eat with it. As the servant gave him his breakfast, David asked if he knew of a tradesman by the name of Alexander Hutton; but the fellow shook his head, and David, after his breakfast was finished, sat gazing into the fire, wondering what to do next, when he heard an old man across the hearth from him, seated on a settle as tall as his own, laugh.

“Zander Hutton, a tradesman,” he cried, and his funny, brown face wrinkled up like a nutcracker under his sparse white hair. “Hey, lad, there beant many in Perth now who know Zander; but we were both tradesmen fifty years ago. By good thrift, I saved, and live in ease; but old Zander dwells up an alley beyond the cathedral. Ask for the ragpicker, and you’ll find him.”

Now was poor David more aghast than ever. That he had come to seek aid from a ragpicker promised badly; but he paid his penny at the bar and walked out into the cold, gray morning, turning toward the gold-crossed spires of the cathedral. “At least,” he thought stoutly, “Zander Hutton may know of some way I can get my living, even if he does pick up rags for his own.”

Up the long High Street, around the cathedral close, and then down a narrow, miry alley, with the odds and ends of the backs of houses sticking out into it, and all the odds and ends of Perth’s poor folk sticking out of them, overflowing windows and doors, cursing, laughing, fighting, singing; and right in the midst of it all was a dingy, low, dirty shop, with a wooden stair outside, leading to a dingier, dirtier attic above, and this was the place David had come to seek. Inside, the room was piled high with rags and bottles, with sacks of bones and heaps of rubbish of every description; and right in its midst sat a little, old, red-eyed man, on a broken stool, who could hardly be told from the other rubbish, so brown and dirty and ragged was he. And yet, when David spoke his name, he answered civilly enough and got off the stool to open the half-door, which he kept barred, he explained, to keep out the bad boys, who were the torment of his life. Even as David went inside, a gang of ragged street urchins yelled about the door: “Old rags--old tags! Old ragged, tagged Zander! Where’s your gold, Old Tags? Bring out the bags of money you count so late at night in your attic.”

Then followed shrieks and yells and catcalls, and David, who had been taught in his village to respect age, ran out angrily upon them, and soon dispersed them with his cudgel.

“Come in, stranger lad,” old Zander chuckled, patting him on the back. “Now what can I do for so brave and fine a lad?”

“I am David, your cousin Allyce’s son,” said David, “and I’ve come to Perth to seek my fortune, as my mother is a widow and too poor to help me. She told me you had a kind heart and would find me work.”

“And so I will,” said the old man. “In this very fine shop there is much to do,--bottles to sort, rags to pick, chains to weigh, and a long beat to walk up and down the alleys of the town, and my old legs grow lame and my back stiff under my pack. You shall have a penny a day, Allyce’s David, lodge above the shop, and feed yourself save for a wee bit o’ porridge of a morning. Come, I’ll show you where to take your bundle.” And he hobbled nimbly outside into the alley and up the broken wooden stair, with David following with a very wry face; for if you set out to make your fortune, you would never think to begin at ragpicking at a penny a day.

The attic was dark and cold and dirty, like the shop, and such of his stock as Zander could not put in the shop was piled here. There were a ragged mattress on the floor, a few battered pieces of furniture, and David was right glad to throw down his bundle and descend with his cousin to eat a scanty meal of porridge, which the old man scraped into a cracked bowl from a pot hanging above a very small fire in the back of the shop.

Then “To work--to work,” the old man cried. And all day long, until the lights came out and the big cathedral bell tolled six, did his cousin Zander keep David hard at it. Then he gave him a penny and showed him a cart around the corner where a man sold a bit of bread and dripping and a cup of coffee for just that much. And tired and half fed, David went to his cold bed at the end of his first day in Perth.

All that long, cold winter David picked rags, sorted rags, collected rags; never quite warm, never quite well fed; and the chief of his discomfort lay in the mice that infested his attic. They nibbled his clothes by day and raced across the floor at night, even daring to frisk over his bed, until, in despair of getting rest and sleep, he fell to making little traps for them, and finally caught them all save one, the oldest and wisest, who was, indeed, the king of all the mice, though David, of course, did not know that. He did know, however, that he vainly saved bits of bacon and cheese from his scanty supper, and vainly baited this trap and that; the King of Mice frisked about the attic unafraid, until he became a pet instead of a pest, and ran out to feed on the choice bits that David carried in his pockets.

Outside the attic window was the roof of a tenement, and here prowled a great black tomcat, gaunt and hungry, like all the alley cats, preying upon sparrows and unwary pigeons, and often, on moonlit nights, peering malevolently through the window-panes upon David’s mouse.

One night Zander came up for some of his plunder and opened the window, and David, entering a few moments later, saw Tom spring from the window with poor mousy in his teeth. Through the window went David after the cat, and though the roof was slippery and steep, he climbed intrepidly up to the very comb, and there had the luck to seize Sir Tom by his tail, and in the mew of pain he let out, the mouse fell from his jaws, scuttled down the tiles, and was soon safe up a drain-pipe, where all Tom’s mewing or scratching failed to reach him.

That night Davy had a queer dream. He thought that he saw his mouse grown taller and walking on his hind legs with much dignity. Six milk-white lady mice held up his tail, and on his head was a very shiny gold crown. Around him came mice of every size, kind, and color, and they all paid him homage and cried, “Hail to the king!”

“This human,” said he to an old white-whiskered fellow at his side, whose collar and mace proclaimed him a chancellor, “has saved the king’s life, and all my subjects must now serve him. He came far to seek his fortune and found only hard fare and uncongenial tasks. Yet cheerfully and well has he done them, and to-morrow he shall find his reward.”

Then all grew dark, the mice disappeared, and old Zander was calling to David from the foot of the stair that it was dawn, and he must start early on his tour of the town. So, with pack on back and stick in hand, Davy started out, whistling, just as the town was waking, thinking of his strange dream and half believing that something would come of it.

Yet nothing new came his way that day, save that his rounds took him past the back door of a mercer’s shop, where a pretty girl called out to him to come and take away the rubbish from their bin. He entered a small, low room, where sat five or six women, laughing and chatting and winding linen thread on little reels for the shop. As he emptied the rubbish bin, the shopman called out to them to hurry, and the girl who had smiled on Davy answered somewhat pertly that if there was some faster way to wind thread, they would certainly get through sooner, as they made little enough as it was.

Later in the day, David passed the prison windows where the French prisoners were confined, and stopped with a small crowd that lingered there, intent on a very ingenious cage which one of them had made, with a wheel at one end turned by a treadmill, wherein a pretty squirrel ran round and round.

That night the wind blew so that the whole house shook, and the crazy windows rattled and the shutters banged, until sleep quite left Davy, and he lay thinking over his dream of last night and of his day’s rounds. And all at once there popped into his head an idea. The thread women turned the reel over and over to wind their thread; if bobbins were strung on a post that turned, why could you not wind many at a time, and if one had a wheel like the French prisoner’s, why would that not wind the thread better than the hand?

He fell asleep turning the idea over in his mind, and dreamed of his mouse again. This time the mouse said, “To-morrow I send my subjects to aid you,” and sure enough, in a forgotten trap set far back in a corner, Davy found three pretty, bright-eyed little mice, who did not seem at all afraid. And you may be sure that Davy was early back at the prison window, studying the wheel cage. And that night he started making one, and by the light of his tallow dip, secreted from Zander’s scant store, in an evening or two he had as neat a cage for his mice as had the French prisoner for his squirrel, only across its end were four reels strung, and by much coaxing he got a penny from old Zander and bought a little thread. That night it was quickly and smoothly wound, and he sold it for two pennies the next day.

And this was the beginning. He fed his little winders well, and as more came into the trap, let each three go free. And always more came, and more, until there was quite a row of little cages, and Zander wondered to find his young ragpicker get fat and rosy, for his thread now kept him well fed.

Days went by. Spring came, and old Zander went out with the winter, leaving his shop and rags to Allyce’s boy, with a bag of coins, not gold, indeed, as the street boys had cried, but enough to clean out the shop, buy thread and materials for wheels, and start Davy up a thread manufactory. For he now began to make reels that were turned by hand, winding twenty bobbins at once, and his little mice were long ago set free.

In a year he had moved from Zander’s alley and set up in a decent street, with his mother, come from Dunfermline, to keep his house.

And because he must needs tell his mother how he had set about making their fortune, and women’s tongues must ever clack, and the good woman must needs tell every old gossip of the kirk, the folk of Perth began to call young David the “Mouse Miller.” And though he became rich and famous, and married the pretty girl who smiled at him from the back door of the shop, until this day Allyce’s David is known as the “Mouse Miller.”