FullReads

“Ou ay,” said Walter, confidently; “ye’re the man that sat at the back window!”

This was the position of the manse seat, and at the Fast Day service Mr. Cameron usually sat there when a stranger preached. Not the least of Walter’s treasures, now in his library, is a dusky little squat book called The Peep of Day, with an inscription on it in Mr. Cameron’s minute and beautiful backhand: “To Walter Carmichael, from the Man at the Back Window.”

The minister was grand. In fact, he usually was grand. On this particular Sunday he preached his two discourses with only the interval of a psalm and a prayer; and his second sermon was on the spiritual rights of a Covenanted kirk, as distinguished from the worldly emoluments of an Erastian establishment. Nothing is so popular as to prove to people what they already believe and that day’s sermon was long remembered among the Cameronians. It redd up their position so clearly, and settled their precedence with such finality, that Walter, hearing that the Frees had done far wrong in not joining the Church of the Protests and Declarations in the year 1843, resolved to have his school-bag full of good road-metal on the following morning, in order to impress the Copland boys, who were Frees, with a sense of their position.

But as the sermon proceeded on its conclusive way, the bowed ranks of the attentive Hill Folk bent further and further forward, during the long periods of the preacher; and when, at the close of each, they drew in a long, united breath like the sighing of the wind, and leaned back in their seats, Walter’s head began to nod over the chapters of First Samuel, which he was spelling out.

David’s wars were a great comfort to him during long sermons. Gradually he dropped asleep, and wakened occasionally with a start when his granny nudged him when Saunders happened to look his way.

As the little fellow’s mind thus came time and again to the surface, he heard snatches of fiery oratory concerning the Sanquhar Declarations and the Covenants, National and Solemn League, till it seemed to him as though the trump of doom would crash before the minister had finished. And he wished it would! But at last, in sheer desperation, having slept apparently about a week, he rose with his feet upon the seat, and in his clear, childish treble he said, being still dazed with sleep–

“Will that man no’ soon be dune?”

It was thus that the movement for short services began in the Cameronian kirk of Cairn Edward. They are an hour and twenty minutes now–a sore declension, as all will admit.

IV. THE THREE M’HAFFIES

Again the red farm-cart rattled out of the town into the silence of the hedges. For the first mile or two, the church-folk returning to the moor-farm might possibly meet and, if they did so, frankly reprove with word or look the “Sunday walkers,” who bit shamefacedly, as well they might, the ends of hawthorn twigs, and communed together apparently without saying a word to each other. There were not many pairs of sweethearts among them–any that were, being set down as “regardless Englishry,” the spawn of the strange, uncannylike building by the lochside, which the “General” had been intending to finish any time these half-dozen years.

For the most part the walkers were young men with companions of their own sex and age, who were anxious to be considered broad in their views. Times have changed now, for we hear that quite respectable folk, even town-councillors, take their walks openly on Sabbath afternoons. It was otherwise in those days.

But none of their own kind did the Drumquhat folk meet or overtake, till at the bottom rise of the mile-long Whinnyliggate Wood the red cart came up with the three brave little old maids who, leaving a Free kirk at their very door, and an Established over the hill, made their way seven long miles to the true kirk of the persecutions.