hands an unmarried man had ever been delivered. MacWheep had his own
trials, but his ruler saw that he had sufficient food and some comfort,
but Barbara laid herself out to make the Rabbi's life a misery. He
only obtained his meals as a favour, and an extra blanket had to be won
by a week's abject humiliation. Fire was only allowed him at times,
and he secured oil for his lamp by stratagem. Latterly he was glad to
send strange ministers to Mains, and his boys alone forced lodgment in
the manse. The settlement of Barbara was the great calamity of the
Rabbi's life, and was the doing of his own good-nature. He first met
her when she came to the manse one evening to discuss the unlawfulness
of infant baptism and the duty of holding Sunday on Saturday, being the
Jewish Sabbath. His interest deepened on learning that she had been
driven from twenty-nine situations through the persecution of the
ungodly; and on her assuring him that she had heard a voice in a dream
bidding her take charge of Kilbogie Manse, the Rabbi, who had suffered
many things at the hands of young girls given to lovers, installed
Barbara, and began to repent that very day. A tall, bony, forbidding
woman, with a squint, and a nose turning red as she stated from chronic
indigestion, let it be said for her that she did not fall into the sins
of her predecessors. It was indeed a pleasant jest in Kilbogie for
four Sabbaths that she allowed a local Romeo, who knew not that his
Juliet was gone, to make his adventurous way to her bedroom window, and
then showed such an amazing visage that he was laid up for a week
through the suddenness of his fall. What the Rabbi endured no one
knew, but his boys understood that the only relief he had from
Barbara's tyranny was on Sabbath evening when she stated her objections
to his sermons, and threatened henceforward to walk into Muirtown in
order to escape from unsound doctrine. On such occasions the Rabbi
laid himself out for her instruction with much zest, and he knew when
he had produced an impression, for then he went supperless to bed.