The little minister took away the lamp to his own room, shaking
his fist at himself for allowing his mother's door to creak. He
pulled up his blind. The town lay as still as salt. But a steady
light showed in the south, and on pressing his face against the
window he saw another in the west. Mr. Carfrae's words about the
night-watch came back to him. Perhaps it had been on such a silent
night as this that the soldiers marched into Thrums. Would they
come again?




CHAPTER IV.

FIRST COMING OF THE EGYPTIAN WOMAN.


A learned man says in a book, otherwise beautiful with truth, that
villages are family groups. To him Thrums would only be a village,
though town is the word we have ever used, and this is not true of
it. Doubtless we have interests in common, from which a place so
near (but the road is heavy) as Tilliedrum is shut out, and we
have an individuality of our own too, as if, like our red houses,
we came from a quarry that supplies no other place. But we are not
one family. In the old days, those of us who were of the Tenements
seldom wandered to the Croft head, and if we did go there we saw
men to whom we could not always give a name. To flit from the
Tanage brae to Haggart's road was to change one's friends. A kirk-
wynd weaver might kill his swine and Tillyloss not know of it