and died Thoreaus "ben the hoose" without knowing it. In those days
the cup overflowed and left several houses on the top of the hill,
where their cold skeletons still stand. The road that climbs from the
square, which is Thrums' heart, to the north is so steep and straight,
that in a sharp frost children hunker at the top and are blown down
with a roar and a rush on rails of ice. At such times, when viewed
from the cemetery where the traveller from the school-house gets his
first glimpse of the little town. Thrums is but two church-steeples
and a dozen red-stone patches standing out of a snow-heap. One of the
steeples belongs to the new Free Kirk, and the other to the parish
church, both of which the first Auld Licht minister I knew ran past
when he had not time to avoid them by taking a back wynd. He was but
a pocket edition of a man, who grew two inches after he was called;
but he was so full of the cure of souls, that he usually scudded to
it with his coat-tails quarrelling behind him. His successor, whom I
knew better, was a greater scholar, and said, "Let us see what this
is in the original Greek," as an ordinary man might invite a friend
to dinner; but he never wrestled as Mr. Dishart, his successor, did
with the pulpit cushions, nor flung himself at the pulpit door. Nor
was he so "hard on the Book," as Lang Tammas, the precentor, expressed
it, meaning that he did not bang the Bible with his fist as much as
might have been wished.

Thrums had been known to me for years before I succeeded the
captious dominie at the school-house in the glen. The dear old soul
who originally induced me to enter the Auld Licht kirk by lamenting
the "want of Christ" in the minister's discourses was my first
landlady. For the last ten years of her life she was bedridden, and
only her interest in the kirk kept her alive. Her case against the
minister was that he did not call to denounce her sufficiently often