the little hill congregation of the Bridge of Cairn, where he had faithfully served a scanty flock for thirty years.  When he resigned he knew that it was but little that his people could do for him.  They were sorry to part with him, and willingly enough accepted the terms which the Presbytery pressed on them, in order to be at liberty to call the man of their choice, a young student from a neighbouring glen, whose powers of fluent speech were thought remarkable in that part of the country.  So Mr. Symington left Bridge of Cairn passing rich on thirty pounds a year, and retired with his deaf old housekeeper to the Clints of Drumore.  Yet forty years before, the Reverend Fergus Symington was counted the luckiest young minister in the Stewartry; and many were the jokes made in public-house parlours and in private houses about his mercenary motives.  He had married money.  He had been wedded with much rejoicing to the rich daughter of a Liverpool merchant, who had made a fortune not too tenderly in the West Indian trade.  Sophia Sugg was ten years the senior of her husband, and her temper was uncertain, but Fergus Symington honestly loved her.  She had a tender and a kindly hearty and he had met her in the houses of the poor near her father’s shooting-lodge in circumstances which did her honour.  So he loved her, and told her of it as simply as though she had been a penniless lass from one of the small farms that made up the staple of his congregation.  They were married, and it is obvious what the countryside would say, specially as there were many eyes that had looked not scornfully at the handsome young minister.

“This, all this was in the golden time,
Long ago.”

The mistress of the little white manse on the Cairn Water lived not unhappily with her husband for four years, and was then laid with her own people in the monstrous new family vault where her father lay in state.  She left two children behind her—­a boy of two and an infant girl of a few weeks.

The children had a nurse, Meysie Dickson, a girl who was already a woman in staidness and steadfastness at fifteen.  She had been in a kind of half-hearted way engaged to be married to Weelum Lammitter, the grieve at Newlands; but when the two bairns were left on her hand, she told Weelum that he had better take Kirst Laurie, which Weelum Lammitter promptly did.  There was a furnished house attached to the grieveship, and he could not let it stand empty any longer.  Still, he would have preferred Meysie, other things being equal.  He even said so to Kirst Laurie, especially when he was taking his tea—­for Kirst was no baker.