“They broke up,” Mr. Carfrae continued, after a pause, “at my entreaty, but they have met again since then.”

“And there were Auld Lichts among them?” Gavin asked.  “I should have thought they would be frightened at our precentor, Lang Tammas, who seems to watch for backsliding in the congregation as if he had pleasure in discovering it.”

Gavin spoke with feeling, for the precentor had already put him through his catechism, and it was a stiff ordeal.

“The precentor!” said Mr. Carfrae.  “Why, he was one of them.”

The old minister, once so brave a figure, tottered as he rose to go, and reeled in a dizziness until he had walked a few paces.  Gavin went with him to the foot of the manse road; without his hat, as all Thrums knew before bedtime.

“I begin,” Gavin said, as they were parting, “where you leave off, and my prayer is that I may walk in your ways.”

“Ah, Mr. Dishart,” the white-haired minister said, with a sigh, “the world does not progress so quickly as a man grows old.  You only begin where I began.”

He left Gavin, and then, as if the little minister’s last words had hurt him, turned and solemnly pointed his staff upward.  Such men are the strong nails that keep the world together.

The twenty-one-years-old minister returned to the manse somewhat sadly, but when he saw his mother at the window of her bed-room, his heart leapt at the thought that she was with him and he had eighty pounds a year.  Gaily he waved both his hands to her, and she answered with a smile, and then, in his boyishness, he jumped over a gooseberry bush.  Immediately afterwards he reddened and tried to look venerable, for while in the air he had caught sight of two women and a man watching him from the dyke.  He walked severely to the door, and, again forgetting himself, was bounding upstairs to Margaret, when Jean, the servant, stood scandalised in his way.

“I don’t think she caught me,” was Gavin’s reflection, and “The Lord preserves!” was Jean’s.

Gavin found his mother wondering how one should set about getting a cup of tea in a house that had a servant in it.  He boldly rang the bell, and the willing Jean answered it so promptly (in a rush and jump) that Margaret was as much startled as Aladdin the first time he rubbed his lamp.

Manse servants of the most admired kind move softly, as if constant contact with a minister were goloshes to them; but Jean was new and raw, only having got her place because her father might be an elder any day.  She had already conceived a romantic affection for her master; but to say “sir” to him-as she thirsted to do—­would have been as difficult to her as to swallow oysters.  So anxious was she to please that when Gavin rang she fired herself at the bed-room, but bells were novelties to her as well as to Margaret, and she cried, excitedly, “What is it?” thinking the house must be on fire.

“There’s a curran folk at the back door,” Jean announced later, “and their respects to you, and would you gie them some water out o’ the well?  It has been a drouth this aucht days, and the pumps is locked.  Na,” she said, as Gavin made a too liberal offer, “that would toom the well, and there’s jimply enough for oursels.  I should tell you, too, that three o’ them is no Auld Lichts.”