Now, this was a most senseless observation, for the cap was a good cap and a new cap, and had cost him one shilling and sixpence at the hat-shop up three stairs at the corner of the Bridges.

* * * * *

The next evening Duncan Rowallan stood by his own door.  Deaf old Mary Haig, his housekeeper, was clacking the pots together in the kitchen and grumbling steadily to herself.  Duncan drew the door to, and went up by the side of his garden, past the straw-built sheds of his bees, a legacy from a former occupant, into the cool breathing twilight of the fields.

He sauntered slowly up the dykeside with his hands behind his back.  He was friends with all the world.  It was true that the school-board had met that day and his salary had been still further reduced, so that it was now thought that for very pride he would leave.  In his interests the Kers had assaulted and battered four fellow-Christians of the contrary opinion, and the Reverend William Henry Calvin had shaken his fist in the stern face of Dr. Hutchison as he defied him at the school-board meeting.  But Duncan only smiled and set his lips a little more firmly.  He did not mean to let himself be driven out—­at least not yet.

Up by the little wood there was a favourite spot from which the whole village could be seen from under the leaves.  It was a patch of firs on the edge of the glebe, a useless rocky place let alone even by the cows.  Against the rough bark of a fir-tree Duncan had fastened a piece of plank in order to form a rude seat.

As soon as he reached his favourite thinking stance, he forgot all about ecclesiastical politics and the strifes of the Kers with the minister.  He stood alone in the wonder of the sunset.  It glowed to the zenith.  But, as very frequently in his own water-colours, the colour had run down to the horizon and flamed intensest crimson in the Nick of Benarick.  Broader and broader mounted the scarlet flame, till he seemed in that still place to hear the sun’s corona crackle, as observers think they do when watching a great eclipse.  The set of the sun affected him like a still morning—­that most mysterious thing in nature.  He missed, indeed, the diffused elation of the dawn; but it was infinitely sweet to hear in that still place the softened sounds of the sweet village life—­for Howpaslet was a Paradise to those to whom its politics were naught.  He saw the blue smoke go up from the supper fires into the windless air in pillars of cloud, then halt, and slowly dissipate into lawny haze.

The cries of the playing children, the belated smith ringing the evening chimes on his anvil in the smithy, the tits chirping among the firs, the crackle of the rough scales on the red boughs of the Scotch fir above him as they cooled—­all fed his soul as though Peter’s sheet had been let down, and there was nothing common or unclean on all the earth.

“I beg your pardon—­will you speak to me?”