ng to persons
thinking of taking the law into their own hands; and all the lasting
consolation they got was that, some time afterwards, the chief witness
against them, the parish minister, met with a mysterious death. They
said it was evidently the hand of God; but some people looked
suspiciously at them when they said it.

CHAPTER VI

THE OLD DOMINIE

From the new cemetery, which is the highest point in Thrums, you just
fail to catch sight of the red schoolhouse that nestles between two
bare trees, some five miles up the glen of Quharity. This was proved
by Davit Lunan, tinsmith, whom I have heard tell the story. It was in
the time when the cemetery gates were locked to keep the bodies of
suicides out, but men who cared to risk the consequences could get the
coffin over the high dyke and bury it themselves. Peter Lundy's coffin
broke, as one might say, into the churchyard in this way, Peter having
hanged himself in the Whunny wood when he saw that work he must. The
general feeling among the intimates of the deceased was expressed by
Davit when he said:

"It may do the crittur nae guid i' the tail o' the day, but he paid
for's bit o' ground, an' he's in's richt to occupy it."

The custom was to push the coffin on to the wall up a plank, and then
let it drop less carefully into the cemetery. Some of the mourners
were dragging the plank over the wall, with Davit Lunan on the top
directing them, when they seem to have let go and sent the tinsmith
suddenly into the air. A week afterwards it struck Davit, when in the
act of soldering a hole in Leeby Wheens's flagon (here he branched off
to explain that he had made the flagon years before, and that Leeby was
sister to Tammas Wheens, and married one Baker Robbie, who died of
chicken-pox in his forty-fourth year), that when "up there" he had a
view of Quharity schoolhouse. Davit was as truthful as a man who tells
the same story more than once can be expected to be, and it is far from
a suspicious circumstance that he did not remember seeing the
schoolhouse all at once. In Thrums things only struck them gradually.
The new cemetery, for instance, was only so called because it had been
new once.

In this red stone school, full of the modern improvements that he
detested, the old dominie whom I succeeded taught, and sometimes slept,
during the last five years of his cantankerous life. It was in a
little thatched school, consisting of but one room, that he di