even lay under its floor. A knight of stone reclined cross legged
in a niche with an arched Norman canopy in one of the walls, the
rest of which was nearly encased in large tablets of white marble,
for at his foot lay the ashes of barons and earls whose title was
extinct, and whose lands had been inherited by the family of Lossie.
Inside as well as outside of the church the ground had risen with
the dust of generations, so that the walls were low; and heavy
galleries having been erected in parts, the place was filled with
shadowy recesses and haunted with glooms. From a window in the
square pew where he sat, so small and low that he had to bend his
head to look out of it, the schoolmaster could see a rivulet of
sunshine, streaming through between two upright gravestones, and
glorifying the long grass of a neglected mound that lay close to
the wall under the wintry drip from the eaves: when he raised his
head, the church looked very dark. The best way there to preach
the Resurrection, he thought, would be to contrast the sepulchral
gloom of the church, its dreary psalms and drearier sermons, with
the sunlight on the graves, the lark filled sky, and the wind blowing
where it listed. But although the minister was a young man of the
commonest order, educated to the church that he might eat bread,
hence a mere willing slave to the beck of his lord and master, the
patron, and but a parrot in the pulpit, the schoolmaster not only
endeavoured to pour his feelings and desires into the mould of his
prayers, but listened to the sermon with a countenance that revealed
no distaste for the weak and unsavoury broth ladled out him to
nourish his soul withal. When however the service--though whose
purposes the affair could be supposed to serve except those of Mr
Cairns himself, would have been a curious question--was over,
he did breathe a sigh of relief; and when he stepped out into the
sun and wind which had been shining and blowing all the time of