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The Annals of the Parish; or, the chronicle of Dalmailing during the ministry of the Rev. Micah Balwhidder by John Galt
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thought that the old woman would have left her heir to all her
gatherings, and so she said she would, but alas! our life is but
within our lip. Before her testament was made, she was carried
suddenly off by an apoplectick, an awful monument of the uncertainty
of time and the nearness of eternity, in her own shop, as she was in
the very act of weighing out an ounce of snuff to a professor of the
College, as Miss Sabrina herself told me. Being thus destitute, it
happened that Miss Sabrina heard of the vacancy in our parish, as it
were, just by the cry of a passing bird, for she could not tell how;
although I judge myself that William Keckle the elder had a hand in
it, as he was at the time in Glasgow; and she wrote me a wonderful
well-penned letter bespeaking the situation, which letter came to
hand on the morn following Lady Macadam's stramash to me about Kate
Malcolm, and I laid it before the session the same day; so that, by
the time her auntie's concern was taken off her hands, she had a
home and a howf among us to come in, to the which she lived upwards
of thirty years in credit and respect, although some thought she had
not the art of her predecessor, and was more uppish in her carriage
than befitted the decorum of her vocation. Hers, however, was but a
harmless vanity; and, poor woman, she needed all manner of graces to
set her out; for she was made up of odds and ends, and had but one
good eye, the other being blind, and just like a blue bead. At
first she plainly set her cap for Mr Lorimore, but after oggling and
goggling at him every Sunday in the kirk for a whole half-year and
more, Miss Sabrina desisted in despair.

But the most remarkable thing about her coming into the parish, was
the change that took place in Christian names among us. Old Mr
Hooky, her father, had, from the time he read his Virgil, maintained
a sort of intromission with the nine muses, by which he was led to
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