“And what are you going to say?” she quizzed him.  “Sitting on my pail!”

Now to quiz Jock was to challenge him.

“Sitting on your pail, missis,” he replied, “I’m going for to say that you’re much too handsome a woman to go down to hell in eternal damnation.”

She was taken aback, but her profession had taught her the art of quick recovery.

“You belong to that Methody lot,” she mildly sneered.  “I thought I seed you talking to them white-chokers.”

“I do,” said Jock.

“And I make no doubt you think yourself very clever.”

“Well,” he vouchsafed, “I can splice a rope, shave a head, cure a wart or a boil, and tell a fine woman with any man in this town.  Not to mention boxing, as I’ve given up on account of my religion.”

“I was handsome once,” said Mrs Clowes, with apparent, but not real, inconsequence.  “But I’m all run to fat, like.  I’ve played Portia in my time.  But now it’s as much as I can do to get through with Maria Martin or Belladonna.”

“Fat!” Jock protested.  “Fat!  I wouldn’t have an ounce taken off ye for fifty guineas.”

He was so enthusiastic that Mrs Clowes blushed.

“What’s this about hell-fire?” she questioned.  “I often think of it—­I’m a lonely woman, and I often think of it.”

“You lonely!” Jock protested again.  “With all them childer?”

“Ay!”

There was a silence.

“See thee here, missis!” he exploded, jumping up from the pail.  “Ye must come to th’ Bethesda down yon, on Sunday morning, and hear the word o’ God.  It’ll be the making on ye.”

Mrs Clowes shook her head.

“Nay!”

“And bring yer children,” he persisted.

“If it was you as was going to preach like!” she said, looking away.

“It is me as is going to preach,” he answered loudly and proudly.  “And
I’ll preach agen any man in this town for a dollar!”

Jock was forgetting himself:  an accident which often happened to him.

V

The Bethesda was crowded on Sunday morning; partly because it was Martinmas Sunday, and partly because the preacher was Jock-at-a-Venture.  That Jock should have been appointed on the “plan” [rota of preachers] to discourse in the principal local chapel of the Connexion at such an important feast showed what extraordinary progress he had already made in the appreciation of that small public of experts which aided the parson in drawing up the quarterly plan.  At the hands of the larger public his reception was sure.  Some sixteen hundred of the larger public had crammed themselves into the chapel, and there was not an empty place either on the ground floor or in the galleries.  Even the “orchestra” (as the “singing-seat” was then called) had visitors in addition to the choir and the double-bass players.  And not a window was open.  At that