second cup of Maud-mixed coffee, my
companion, with a little show of haste, had gone in search of the
kirk, and I followed him, with more scrupulousness, as soon as I
could without breaking the day of rest. Although it was Sunday, I
could not but notice that Baddeck was a clean-looking village of
white wooden houses, of perhaps seven or eight hundred inhabitants;
that it stretched along the bay for a mile or more, straggling off
into farmhouses at each end, lying for the most part on the sloping
curve of the bay. There were a few country-looking stores and shops,
and on the shore three or four rather decayed and shaky wharves ran
into the water, and a few schooners lay at anchor near them; and the
usual decaying warehouses leaned about the docks. A peaceful and
perhaps a thriving place, but not a bustling place. As I walked down
the road, a sailboat put out from the shore and slowly disappeared
round the island in the direction of the Grand Narrows. It had a
small pleasure party on board. None of them were drowned that day,
and I learned at night that they were Roman Catholics from
Whykokornagh.

The kirk, which stands near the water, and at a distance shows a
pretty wooden spire, is after the pattern of a New England
meeting-house. When I reached it, the house was full and the service
had begun. There was something familiar in the bareness and
uncompromising plainness and ugliness of the interior. The pews had
high backs, with narrow, uncushioned seats. The pulpit was high,--a
sort of theological fortification,--approached by wide, curving
flights of stairs on either side. Those who occupied the near seats
to the right and left of the pulpit had in front of them a blank
board partition, and could not by any possibility see the minister,
though they broke their necks backwards over their high coat-collars.
The congregation had a striking resemblance to a country New England
congregation of say twenty years ago. The clothes they wore had been
Sunday clothes for at least that length of time.

Such clothes have a look of I know not what devout and painful
respectability, that is in keeping with the worldly notion of rigid
Scotch Presbyterianism. One saw with pleasure the fresh and
rosy-cheeked children of this strict generation, but the women of the
audience were not in appearance different from newly arrived and
respectable Irish immigrants. They wore a white cap with long frills
over the forehead, and a black handker