which they had
undertaken to provide.

The day following was the first of the "Communion Season." In a Highland
congregation the Communion Seasons are the great occasions of the year.
For weeks before, the congregation is kept in mind of the approaching
event, and on the Thursday of the communion week the season opens with a
solemn fast day.

The annual Fast Day, still a national institution in Scotland, although
it has lost much of its solemnity and sacredness in some places, was
originally associated with the Lord's Supper, and was observed with
great strictness in the matter of eating and drinking; and in Indian
Lands, as in all congregations of that part of the country, the custom
of celebrating the Fast Day was kept up. It was a day of great solemnity
in the homes of the people of a godly sort. There was no cooking of
meals till after "the services," and indeed, some of them tasted
neither meat nor drink the whole day long. To the younger people of the
congregation it was a day of gloom and terror, a kind of day of doom.
Even to those advanced in godliness it brought searchings of heart,
minute and diligent, with agonies of penitence and remorse. It was a
day, in short, in which conscience was invited to take command of the
memory and the imagination to the scourging of the soul for the soul's
good. The sermon for the day was supposed to stimulate and to aid
conscience in this work.

For the communion service Mr. Murray always made it a point to have the
assistance of the best preachers he could procure, and on this occasion,
when the church opening was combined with the sacrament, by a special
effort two preachers had been procured--a famous divine from Huron
County, that stronghold of Calvinism, and a college professor who had
been recently appointed, but who had already gained a reputation as a
doctrinal preacher, and who was, as Peter McRae reported, "grand on the
Attributes and terrible fine on the Law." To him was assigned the honor
of preaching the Fast Day sermon, and of declaring the church "open."

The new church was very different from the old. Instead of the high
crow's nest, with the wonderful sounding-board over it, the pulpit was
simply a raised platform partly inclosed, with the desk in front. There
was no precentor's box, over the loss of which Straight Rory did not
grieve unduly, inasmuch as the singing was to be led, in the English
at least, by John "Aleck." Henceforth the elders would sit wi