g from under the eaves of his eyebrows as the swarthy men from
the Machars are wont to do. His companions said no more. They came to
Camelon Lane, where usually Robert Kirk had a leaping pole on either
bank to assist the traveller across, but both poles had gone down the
water in the morning to look for Robert's meadow hay.

'Tak' care, Maister Maclellan, ye'll be in deep water afore ye ken. O
man, ye had far better turn!'

The precentor stood up to his knees in water on what had once been the
bank, and wrung his hands. But the minister pushed steadily ahead into
the turbid and sluggish water.

'I canna come, oh, I canna come, for I'm a man that has a family.'

'It's no' your work; stay where ye are,' cried the minister, without
looking over his shoulder; 'but as for me, I'm intimated to preach this
night at Cauldshaws, and my text----'

Here he stepped into a deep hole, and his text was suddenly shut within
him by the gurgle of moss water in his throat. His arms rose above the
surface like the black spars of a windmill. But Ebie Kirgan sculled
himself swiftly out, swimming with his shoeless feet, and pushed the
minister before him to the further bank--the water gushing out of rents
in his clothes as easily as out of the gills of a fish.

The minister stood with unshaken confidence on the bank. He ran peat
water like a spout in a thunder plump, and black rivulets of dye were
trickling from under his hat down his brow and dripping from the end of
his nose.

'Then you'll not come any farther?' he called cross to the precentor.

'I canna, oh, I canna; though I'm most awfu' wullin'. Kirsty wad never
forgie me gin I was to droon.'

'Then I'll e'en have to raise the tune myself--though three times
"Kilmarneck" is a pity,' said the minister, turning on his heel and
striding away through the shallow sea, splashing the water as high as
his head with a kind of headstrong glee which seemed to the precentor a
direct defiance of Providence. Ebie Kirgan followed half a dozen steps
behind. The support of the precentor's lay semi-equality taken from
him, he began to regret that he had come, and silently and ruefully
plunged along after the minister through the waterlogged meadows. They
came in time to the foot of Robert Kirk's march dyke, and skirted it a
hundred yards upward to avoid the deep pool in which the Laneburn
waters were swirling. The minister climbed silently up the seven-foot
dyke, pausing a second on