for her sins, her pleasure being to hear him bewailing her on his
knees as one who was probably past praying for. She was as sweet and
pure a woman as I ever knew, and had her wishes been horses, she
would have sold them and kept (and looked after) a minister herself.

There are few Auld Licht communities in Scotland nowadays--perhaps
because people are now so well off, for the most devout Auld Lichts
were always poor, and their last years were generally a grim
struggle with the workhouse. Many a heavy-eyed, back-bent weaver has
won his Waterloo in Thrums fighting on his stumps. There are a score
or two of them left still, for, though there are now two factories
in the town, the clatter of the hand-loom can yet be heard, and they
have been starving themselves of late until they have saved up
enough money to get another minister.

The square is packed away in the centre of Thrums, and irregularly
built little houses squeeze close to it like chickens clustering
round a hen. Once the Auld Lichts held property in the square, but
other denominations have bought them out of it, and now few of them
are even to be found in the main streets that make for the rim of
the cup. They live in the kirk wynd, or in retiring little houses,
the builder of which does not seem to have remembered that it is a
good plan to have a road leading to houses until after they were
finished. Narrow paths straggling round gardens, some of them with
stunted gates, which it is commoner to step over than, to open, have
been formed to reach these dwellings, but in winter they are running
streams, and then the best way to reach a house such as that of
Tammy Mealmaker the wright, pronounced wir-icht, is over a broken
dyke and a pig-sty. Tammy, who died a bachelor, had been soured in
his youth by a disappointment in love, of which he spoke but seldom.