headed, and have to stretch out their
hands to discover what the weather is like. By and by they come to a
standstill to discuss the immortality of the soul, and then they are
looking silently at the Bull. Neither speaks, but they begin to move
toward the inn at the same time, and its door closes on them before
they know what they are doing. A few minutes afterwards Jinny Dundas,
who is Pete's wife, runs straight for the Bull in her short gown, which
is tucked up very high, and emerges with her husband soon afterwards.
Jinny is voluble, but Pete says nothing. Tammas follows later, putting
his head out at the door first, and looking cautiously about him to see
if any one is in sight. Pete is a U. P., and may be left to his fate,
but the Auld Licht minister thinks that though it be hard work, Tammas
is worth saving.

To the Auld Licht of the past there were three degrees of
damnation--auld kirk, play-acting, chapel. Chapel was the name always
given to the English Church, of which I am too much an Auld Licht
myself to care to write even now. To belong to the chapel was, in
Thrums, to be a Roman Catholic, and the boy who flung a clod of earth
at the English minister--who called the Sabbath Sunday--or dropped a
"divet" down his chimney was held to be in the right way. The only
pleasant story Thrums could tell of the chapel was that its steeple
once fell. It is surprising that an English church was ever suffered
to be built in such a place; though probably the county gentry had
something to do with it. They travelled about too much to be good men.
Small though Thrums used to be, it had four kirks in all before the
Disruption, and then another, which split into two immediately
afterwards. The spire of the parish church, known as the auld kirk,
commands a view of the square, from which the entrance to the kirkyard
would be visible, if it were not hidden by the town-house. The
kirkyard has long been crammed, and is not now in use, but the church
is sufficiently large to hold nearly all the congregations in Thrums.
Just at the gate lived Pete Todd, the father of Sam'l, a man of whom
the Auld Lichts had reason to be proud. Pete was an every-day man at
ordinary times, and was even said, when his wife, who had been long
ill, died, to have clapped his hands and exclaimed, "Hip, hip, hurrah!"
adding only as an afterthought, "The Lord's will be done." But
midsummer was his great opportunity. Then took place the rouping o