My old friend’s ministry in the Free Kirk of Scotland is drawing to a close; he has lived in this manse, a stone’s throw from his grave, for fifty years, and the approaching change of habitat will cost him nothing.  He will still lie at the foot of his beloved hills, and the purple moorland will spread around him for all eternity, and the smell of the gorse and heather will fill his nostrils as he sleeps.  He is a bit of a pagan, old McQuhatty, in spite of Calvin and the Shorter Catechism.  I should not wonder if he were the original of the story of the minister who prayed for the “puir Deil.”  He planted a rowan tree by his porch when he was first inducted into the manse, and it has grown up with him and he loves it as if it were a human being.  He has had many bonny arguments with it, he says, on points of doctrine, and it has brought comfort to him in times of doubt by shivering its delicate leaves and whispering, “Dinna fash yoursel, McQuhatty.  The Lord God is a sensible body.”  He declares that the words are articulate, and I suspect that in the depths of his heart he believes that there are tongues in trees and books in the running brooks, just as he is convinced that there is good in everything.

He is a ripe and whimsical scholar, and his talk, even in infirm old age, is marked by a Doric virility which has rendered his companionship for these five days as stimulating as the moorland air.  How few men have this gift of discharging intellectual invigoration.  Indeed, I only know old McQuhatty who has it, and a sportive Providence has carefully excluded mankind from its benefits for half a century.  Stay:  it once fostered a genius who arose in Campsie, and sent him strung with tonic to Edinburgh to become a poet.  But the poor lad drank whisky for two years without cessation, so that he died, and McQuhatty’s inspiration was wasted.  What intellectual stimulus can he afford, for instance, to Sandy McGrath, an elder of the kirk whom I saw coming up the brae on Sunday?  An old ram stood in the path and, as obstinate as he, refused to budge.  And as they looked dourly at each other, I wondered if the ram were dressed in black broadcloth and McGrath in wool, whether either of their mothers would notice the metamorphosis.  Yet my host declares that I see with the eyes of a Southron; that the Scotch peasant when he is not drunk is intellectual, and that there is no occasion on which he is not ready for theological disputation.

“But I dinna mind telling you,” he added, “that I’d as lief talk with my rowan tree.  It does nae blaze into a conflagration at a comfortable wee bit of false doctrine.”