The fourteen adherents fled underneath the table like chickens in a storm.

“Then will I open it in my own name!” Whereon followed a crash, and the two halves of the kitchen door sprang asunder with great and sudden noise.  Abraham Ligartwood came in.

The men sat awed, each man wishful to creep behind his neighbour.

The minister’s breadth of shoulder filled up the doorway completely, so that there was not room for a child to pass.  He carried a mighty staff in his hand, and his dark hair shone through the powder which was upon it.  His glance swept the gathering.  His eye glowed with a sparkle of such fiery wrath that not a man of all the seventeen and an elder, was unafraid.  Yet not of his violence, but rather of the lightnings of his words.  And above all, of his power to loose and to bind.  It is a mistaken belief that priestdom died when they spelled it Presbytery.

The comprehensive nature of the anathema that followed—­spoken from the advantage of the doorway, with personal applications to the seventeen individuals and the elder—­cannot now be recalled; but scraps of that address are circulated to this day, mostly spoken under the breath of the narrator.

“And you, Portmark,” the minister is reported to have said, “with your face like the moon in harvest and your girth like a tun of Rhenish, gin ye turn not from your evil ways, within four year ye shall sup with the devil whom ye serve.  Have ye never a word to say, ye scorners of the halesome word, ye blaspheming despisers of doctrine?  Your children shall yet stand and rebuke you in the gate.  Heard ye not my word on the Sabbath in the kirk?  Dumb dogs are ye every one!  Have ye not a word to say?  There was a brave gabble of tongues enough when I came in.  Are ye silent before a man?  How, then, shall ye stand in That Day?”

The minister paused for a reply.  But no answer came.

“And you, Alexander Kippen, puir windlestrae, the Lord shall thresh ye like ill-grown corn in the day of His wrath.  Ye are hardly worth the word of rebuke; but for mine office I wad let ye slip quick to hell!  The devil takes no care of you, for he is sure of ye!”

The minister advanced, and with the iron-pointed shod of his staff drove in the bung of the first keg.  Then there arose a groan from the seventeen men who sat about.  Some of them stood up on their feet.  But the minister turned on them with such fearsome words, laying the ban of anathema on them, that their hearts became as water and they sat down.  The good spirit gurgled and ran, and deep within them the seventeen men groaned for the pity of it.

Thus the minister broke up the black drinkings.  And the opinion of the parish was with him in all, except as to the spilling of the liquor.  Rebuke and threatening were within his right, but to pour out the spirit was a waste even in a minister.

“It is the destruction of God’s good creature!” said the parish of Dour.