Housekeepers are, after beadles, the most wonderful functionaries in the ecclesiastical life of Scotland, and every species could be found within a day’s journey of Drumtochty.  Jenkins, indeed, suggested that a series of papers on Church institutions read at the clerical club should include one on housekeepers, and offered to supply the want, which was the reason why Dr. Dowbiggin refused to certify him to a vacancy, speaking of him as “frivolous and irresponsible.”  The class ranged from Sarah of Drumtochty, who could cook and knew nothing about ecclesiastical affairs, to that austere damsel, Margaret Meiklewham of Pitscowrie, who had never prepared an appetising meal in her life, but might have sat as an elder in the Presbytery.

Among all her class, Barbara MacCluckie stood an easy worst, being the most incapable, unsightly, evil-tempered, vexatious woman into whose hands an unmarried man had ever been delivered.  MacWheep had his own trials, but his ruler saw that he had sufficient food and some comfort, but Barbara laid herself out to make the Rabbi’s life a misery.  He only obtained his meals as a favour, and an extra blanket had to be won by a week’s abject humiliation.  Fire was only allowed him at times, and he secured oil for his lamp by stratagem.  Latterly he was glad to send strange ministers to Mains, and his boys alone forced lodgment in the manse.  The settlement of Barbara was the great calamity of the Rabbi’s life, and was the doing of his own good-nature.  He first met her when she came to the manse one evening to discuss the unlawfulness of infant baptism and the duty of holding Sunday on Saturday, being the Jewish Sabbath.  His interest deepened on learning that she had been driven from twenty-nine situations through the persecution of the ungodly; and on her assuring him that she had heard a voice in a dream bidding her take charge of Kilbogie Manse, the Rabbi, who had suffered many things at the hands of young girls given to lovers, installed Barbara, and began to repent that very day.  A tall, bony, forbidding woman, with a squint, and a nose turning red as she stated from chronic indigestion, let it be said for her that she did not fall into the sins of her predecessors.  It was indeed a pleasant jest in Kilbogie for four Sabbaths that she allowed a local Romeo, who knew not that his Juliet was gone, to make his adventurous way to her bedroom window, and then showed such an amazing visage that he was laid up for a week through the suddenness of his fall.  What the Rabbi endured no one knew, but his boys understood that the only relief he had from Barbara’s tyranny was on Sabbath evening when she stated her objections to his sermons, and threatened henceforward to walk into Muirtown in order to escape from unsound doctrine.  On such occasions the Rabbi laid himself out for her instruction with much zest, and he knew when he had produced an impression, for then he went supperless to bed.  Between this militant spirit and the boys there was an undying feud, and Carmichael was not at all hurt to hear her frank references to himself.