or at length, for his policy was generally a silence pregnant with
judgment, and his deliverances were for the most part in parables,
none the less awful because hard of interpretation. Like every true
Celt, he had the power of reserve, and knew the value of mystery.
His voice must not be heard in irresponsible gossip at the Kirk door,
and he never condescended to the level of Mrs. MacFadyen, our recognised
sermon taster, who criticised everything in the technique of the pulpit,
from the number of heads in a sermon to the air with which a probationer
used his pocket-handkerchief. She lived in the eye of the public, and
gave her opinions with the light heart of a newspaper writer; but
Lachlan kept himself in the shadow and wore a manner of studied humility
as became the administrator of the Holy Office in Drumtochty.

Lachlan was a little man, with a spare, wiry body, iron grey hair
and whiskers carefully arranged, a keen, old-fashioned face
sharpened by much spiritual thinking, and eyes that looked at you
from beneath shaggy eyebrows as from some other world. His face had
an irresistible suggestion of a Skye terrier, the most serious of
animals, with the hair reduced, and Drumsheugh carried us all with
him when, in a moment of inspiration, he declared that "the body
looks as if he hed juist come oot o' the Ark." He was a shepherd to
trade, and very faithful in all his work, but his life business was
theology, from Supralapsarianism in Election to the marks of faith
in a believer's heart. His library consisted of some fifty volumes
of ancient divinity, and lay on an old oak kist close to his hand,
where he sat beside the fire of a winter night. When the sheep were
safe and his day's labour was over, he read by the light of the fire
and the "crusie" (oil-lamp) overhead, Witsius on the Covenants, or
Rutherford's "Christ Dying," or Bunyan's "Grace Abounding," or
Owen's "130th Psalm," while the collies slept at his feet, and Flora