“It was the fender,” she declared.

“It was,” he assented, “but it’s no for me to cheapen him, so I let them see your new mahogany chair.  ‘Thomas Sandys’s chair,’ they call it, and they sit down in it reverently.  They winna even leave you the piano.  ‘Was this Thomas Sandys’s piano?’ they speir.  ‘It was,’ says I, and syne they gowp at it.”  His under lip shot out, a sure sign that he was angry.  “I dinna blame him,” he said, “but he had the same masterful way of scooping everything into his lap when he was a laddie, and I like him none the mair for it”; and from this position Aaron would not budge.

“Quite right, too,” Tommy said, when he heard of it.  “But you can tell him, Elspeth, that we shall allow no more of those prying women to come in.”  And he really meant this, for he was a modest man that day, was Tommy.  Nevertheless, he was, perhaps, a little annoyed to find, as the days went on, that no more ladies came to be turned away.

He heard that they had also been unable to resist the desire to shake hands with Thomas Sandys’s schoolmaster.  “It must have been a pleasure to teach him,” they said to Cathro.

“Ah me, ah me!” Cathro replied enigmatically.  It had so often been a pleasure to Cathro to thrash him!

“Genius is odd,” they said.  “Did he ever give you any trouble?”

“We were like father and son,” he assured them.  With natural pride he showed them the ink-pot into which Thomas Sandys had dipped as a boy.  They were very grateful for his interesting reminiscence that when the pot was too full Thomas inked his fingers.  He presented several of them with the ink-pot.

Two ladies, who came together, bothered him by asking what the Hugh Blackadder competition was.  They had been advised to inquire of him about Thomas Sandys’s connection therewith by another schoolmaster, a Mr. Ogilvy, whom they had met in one of the glens.

Mr. Cathro winced, and then explained with emphasis that the Hugh Blackadder was a competition in which the local ministers were the sole judges; he therefore referred the ladies to them.  The ladies did go to a local minister for enlightenment, to Mr. Dishart; but, after reflecting, Mr. Dishart said that it was too long a story, and this answer seemed to amuse Mr. Ogilvy, who happened to be present.

It was Mr. McLean who retailed this news to Tommy.  He and Ailie had walked home from church with the newcomers on the day after their arrival, the day of the christening.  They had not gone into Aaron’s house, for you are looked askance at in Thrums if you pay visits on Sundays, but they had stood for a long time gossiping at the door, which is permitted by the strictest.  Ailie was in a twitter, as of old, and not able even yet to speak of her husband without an apologetic look to the ladies who had none.  And oh, how proud she was of Tommy’s fame!  Her eyes were an offering to him.

“Don’t take her as a sample of the place, though,” Mr. McLean warned him, “for Thrums does not catch fire so readily as London.”  It was quite true.  “I was at the school wi’ him,” they said up there, and implied that this damned his book.