From 'The Little Minister': by permission of the American Publishers'
Corporation.
One may gossip in a glen on Sabbaths, though not in a town, without
losing his character, and I used to await the return of my neighbor, the
farmer of Waster Lunny, and of Birse, the Glen Quharity post, at the end
of the school-house path. Waster Lunny was a man whose care in his
leisure hours was to keep from his wife his great pride in her. His
horse, Catlaw, on the other hand, he told outright what he thought of
it, praising it to its face and blackguarding it as it deserved, and I
have seen him, when completely baffled by the brute, sit down before it
on a stone and thus harangue:--"You think you're clever, Catlaw, my
lass, but you're mista'en. You're a thrawn limmer, that's what you are.
You think you have blood in you. You ha'e blood! Gae awa, and dinna
blether. I tell you what, Catlaw, I met a man yestreen that kent your
mither, and he says she was a feikie,[3] fushionless besom. What do you
say to that?"
[Footnote 3: Feikie, over-particular.]
As for the post, I will say no more of him than that his bitter topic
was the unreasonableness of humanity, which treated him graciously when
he had a letter for it, but scowled at him when he had none, "aye
implying that I ha'e a letter, but keep it back."
On the Sabbath evening after the riot, I stood at the usual place
awaiting my friends, and saw before they reached me that they had
something untoward to tell. The farmer, his wife, and three children,
holding each other's hands, stretched across the road. Birse was a
little behind, but a conversation was being kept up by shouting. All
were walking the Sabbath pace, and the family having started half a
minute in advance, the post had not yet made up on them.
"It's sitting to snaw," Waster Lunny said, drawing near, and just as I
was to reply, "It is so," Silva slipped in the words before me.
"You wasna at the kirk," was Elspeth's salutation. I had been at the
glen church, but did not contradict her, for it is Established, and so
neither here nor there. I was anxious, too, to know what their long
faces meant, and therefore asked at once,--"Was Mr. Dishart on
the riot?"
"Forenoon, ay; afternoon, no," replied Waster Lunny, walking round his
wife to get nearer me. "Dominie, a queery thing happened in the kirk
this day, sic as--"
"Waster Lunny," interrupted Elspeth sharply, "have you on your Sabbath
shoon or have you no on your Sabbath shoon?"
"Guid care you took I should ha'e the dagont oncanny things on,"
retorted the farmer.
"Keep out o' the gutter, then," said Elspeth, "on the Lord's day."
"Him," said her man, "that is forced by a foolish woman to wear genteel
'lastic-sided boots canna forget them until he takes them aff. Whaur's
the extra reverence in wearing shoon twa sizes ower sma'?"
"It mayna be mair reverent," suggested Birse, to whom Elspeth's kitchen
was a pleasant place, "but it's grand, and you canna expect to be baith
grand and comfortable."