Yet when the long-looked-for end of the divinity course came, and the graduating class burst asunder, scattering seed over the land like an over-ripe carpel in the September sun, Ebenezer Skinner was one of the first to take root.  He preached in a “vacancy” by chance, supplying for a man who had been taken suddenly ill.  He read a discourse which he had written on the strictest academical lines for his college professor, and in the composition of which he had been considerably assisted by a volume of Mr. Spurgeon’s sermons which he had brought home from Thin’s wondrous shop on the Bridges, where many theological works await the crack of doom.  The congregation to which he preached was in the stage of recoil from the roaring demagogy of a late minister, and all too promptly elected this modest young man.

But when the young man moved from Simon Square into the Townend manse, and began to preach twice a Sunday to the clear-headed business men and the sore-hearted women of many cares who filled the kirk, his ignorance of all but these theological books, as well as an innocence of the motives and difficulties of men and women (which would have been childlike had it not been childish), predoomed him to failure.  His ignorance of modern literature was so appalling that the youngest member of his Bible-class smiled when he mentioned Tennyson.  These and other qualities went far to make the Reverend Ebenezer Skinner the ministerial “inefficient” that he undoubtedly was.

But in time he became vaguely conscious that there was something wrong, yet for the life of him he could not think what it was.  He knew that he had done every task that was ever set him.  He had trodden faithfully the appointed path.  He was not without some ability.  And yet, though he did his best, he was sadly aware that he was not successful.  Being a modest fellow, he hoped to improve, and went the right way about it.  He knew that somehow it must be his own fault.  He did not count himself a “Product,” and he never blamed the Mill.

PART II

[Reported by Saunders M’Quhirr of Drumquhat.]

SKINNER—­HALDANE.—­On the 25th instant, at the Manse of Kirkmichael, by the Rev. Alexander Haldane, father of the bride, the Rev. Ebenezer Skinner, minister of Townend Church, Cairn Edward, to Elizabeth Catherine Haldane.—­Scotsman, June 27th.

This was the beginning of it, as some foresaw that it would be.  I cut it out of the Scotsman to keep, and my wife has pasted it at the top of my paper.  But none of us knew it for certain, though there was Robbie Scott, John Scott’s son, that is herd at the Drochills in the head-end of the parish of Kirkmichael—­he wrote home to his father in a letter that I saw myself:  “I hear you’re to get our minister’s dochter down by you; she may be trusted to keep you brisk about Cairn Edward.”