“Nor me,” said Waster Lunny, “though I only got the tail o’t.  Dominie, no sooner had he said Genesis third and sixth, than I laid my finger on Ezra.  Was it no provoking?  Onybody can turn up Genesis, but it needs an able-bodied man to find Ezra.”

“He preached on the Fall,” Elspeth said, “for an hour and twenty-five minutes, but powerful though he was I would rather he had telled us what made him gie the go-by to Ezra.”

“All I can say,” said Waster Lunny, “is that I never heard him mair awe-inspiring.  Whaur has he got sic a knowledge of women?  He riddled them, he fair riddled them, till I was ashamed o’ being married.”

“It’s easy kent whaur he got his knowledge of women,” Birse explained, “it’s a’ in the original Hebrew.  You can howk ony mortal thing out o’ the original Hebrew, the which all ministers hae at their finger ends.  What else makes them ken to jump a verse now and then when giving out a psalm?”

“It wasna women like me he denounced,” Elspeth insisted, “but young lassies that leads men astray wi’ their abominable wheedling ways.”

“Tod,” said her husband, “if they try their hands on Mr. Dishart they’ll meet their match.”

“They will,” chuckled the post.  “The Hebrew’s a grand thing, though teuch, I’m telled, michty teuch.”

“His sublimest burst,” Waster Lunny came back to tell me, “was about the beauty o’ the soul being everything and the beauty o’ the face no worth a snuff.  What a scorn he has for bonny faces and toom souls!  I dinna deny but what a bonny face fell takes me, but Mr. Dishart wouldna gi’e a blade o’ grass for’t.  Ay, and I used to think that in their foolishness about women there was dagont little differ atween the unlearned and the highly edicated.”

THE MUTUAL DISCOVERY

From ‘The Little Minister’:  by permission of the American Publishers’ Corporation

A young man thinks that he alone of mortals is impervious to love, and so the discovery that he is in it suddenly alters his views of his own mechanism.  It is thus not unlike a rap on the funny-bone.  Did Gavin make this discovery when the Egyptian left him?  Apparently he only came to the brink of it and stood blind.  He had driven her from him for ever, and his sense of loss was so acute that his soul cried out for the cure rather than for the name of the malady.

In time he would have realized what had happened, but time was denied him, for just as he was starting for the mudhouse Babbie saved his dignity by returning to him....  She looked up surprised, or seemingly surprised, to find him still there.

“I thought you had gone away long ago,” she said stiffly.

“Otherwise,” asked Gavin the dejected, “you would not have came back to the well?”

“Certainly not.”

“I am very sorry.  Had you waited another moment I should have been gone.”

This was said in apology, but the willful Egyptian chose to change its meaning.