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This cargo-running and seizures were all according to rule, and the minister of Dour had nothing to say. But at night seventeen of his kirk members in good standing and fourteen adherents met at the Back Spital of Port Dour to drink prosperity to the cargo which had been safely run. There was an elder in the chair, and six unbroached casks on a board in the corner.

There was among those who assembled some word of scoffing merriment at the expense of the minister. Abraham Ligartwood had preached a sermon on the Sabbath before, which each man, as the custom was, took home and applied to his neighbour.

“Ay man, Mains, did ye hear what the minister said aboot ye? O man, he was sair on ye!”

“Hoot na, Portmark, it was yersel’ he was hittin’ at, and the black e’e ye gied Kirsty six weeks syne.”

But when the first keg was on the table, and the men, each with his pint-stoup before him, had seated themselves round, there came a knocking at the door–loud, insistent, imperious. Each man ran his hand down his side to the loaded whip or jockteleg (the smuggler’s sheath-knife) which he carried with him.

But no man was in haste to open the door. The red coats of King George’s troopers might be on the other side. For no mere gauger or preventive man would have the assurance to come chapping on Portmark’s door in that fashion.

“Open the door in the name of Most High God!” cried a loud, solemn voice they all knew. The seventeen men and an elder quaked through all their inches; but none moved. Writs from the authority mentioned did not run in the parish of Dour.

The fourteen adherents fled underneath the table like chickens in a storm.

“Then will I open it in my own name!” Whereon followed a crash, and the two halves of the kitchen door sprang asunder with great and sudden noise. Abraham Ligartwood came in.

The men sat awed, each man wishful to creep behind his neighbour.

The minister’s breadth of shoulder filled up the doorway completely, so that there was not room for a child to pass. He carried a mighty staff in his hand, and his dark hair shone through the powder which was upon it. His glance swept the gathering. His eye glowed with a sparkle of such fiery wrath that not a man of all the seventeen and an elder, was unafraid. Yet not of his violence, but rather of the lightnings of his words. And above all, of his power to loose and to bind. It is a mistaken belief that priestdom died when they spelled it Presbytery.

The comprehensive nature of the anathema that followed–spoken from the advantage of the doorway, with personal applications to the seventeen individuals and the elder–cannot now be recalled; but scraps of that address are circulated to this day, mostly spoken under the breath of the narrator.

“And you, Portmark,” the minister is reported to have said, “with your face like the moon in harvest and your girth like a tun of Rhenish, gin ye turn not from your evil ways, within four year ye shall sup with the devil whom ye serve. Have ye never a word to say, ye scorners of the halesome word, ye blaspheming despisers of doctrine? Your children shall yet stand and rebuke you in the gate. Heard ye not my word on the Sabbath in the kirk? Dumb dogs are ye every one! Have ye not a word to say? There was a brave gabble of tongues enough when I came in. Are ye silent before a man? How, then, shall ye stand in That Day?”

The minister paused for a reply. But no answer came.

“And you, Alexander Kippen, puir windlestrae, the Lord shall thresh ye like ill-grown corn in the day of His wrath. Ye are hardly worth the word of rebuke; but for mine office I wad let ye slip quick to hell! The devil takes no care of you, for he is sure of ye!”