“Ye’re ower extravegint, Sam’l,” Lisbeth said.

“Not at all,” said Sam’l; “not at all.  But I wouldna advise ye to eat thae ither anes, Bell—­they’re second quality.”

Bell drew back a step from Sam’l.

“How do ye kin?” asked the farmer, shortly; for he liked Sanders.

“I speired i’ the shop,” said Sam’l.

The goblet was placed on a broken plate on the table, with the saucer beside it, and Sam’l, like the others, helped himself.  What he did was to take potatoes from the pot with his fingers, peel off their coats, and then dip them into the butter.  Lisbeth would have liked to provide knives and forks, but she knew that beyond a certain point T’nowhead was master in his own house.  As for Sam’l, he felt victory in his hands, and began to think that he had gone too far.

In the meantime, Sanders, little witting that Sam’l had trumped his trick, was sauntering along the kirk-wynd with his hat on the side of his head.  Fortunately he did not meet the minister.

The courting of T’nowhead’s Bell reached its crisis one Sabbath about a month after the events above recorded.  The minister was in great force that day, but it is no part of mine to tell how he bore himself.  I was there, and am not likely to forget the scene.  It was a fateful Sabbath for T’nowhead’s Bell and her swains, and destined to be remembered for the painful scandal which they perpetrated in their passion.

Bell was not in the kirk.  There being an infant of six months in the house, it was a question of either Lisbeth or the lassie’s staying at home with him, and though Lisbeth was unselfish in a general way, she could not resist the delight of going to church.  She had nine children besides the baby, and being but a woman, it was the pride of her life to march them into the T’nowhead pew, so well watched that they dared not disbehave, and so tightly packed that they could not fall.  The congregation looked at that pew, the mothers enviously, when they sung the lines:—­

     “Jerusalem like a city is
     Compactly built together.”

The first half of the service had been gone through on this particular Sunday without anything remarkable happening.  It was at the end of the psalm which preceded the sermon that Sanders Elshioner, who sat near the door, lowered his head until it was no higher than the pews, and in that attitude, looking almost like a four-footed animal, slipped out of the church.  In their eagerness to be at the sermon, many of the congregation did not notice him, and those who did, put the matter by in their minds for future investigation.  Sam’l, however, could not take it so coolly.  From his seat in the gallery he saw Sanders disappear and his mind misgave him.  With the true lover’s instinct, he understood it all.  Sanders had been struck by the fine turn-out in the T’nowhead pew.  Bell was alone at the farm.  What an opportunity to work one’s way up to a proposal.  T’nowhead was so overrun with children that such a chance seldom occurred, except on a Sabbath.  Sanders, doubtless, was off to propose, and he, Sam’l, was left behind.