The next day was Sabbath, when a new trial, now to be told, awaited Gavin in the pulpit; but it had nothing to do with the cloak, of which I may here record the end.  Wearyworld had not forwarded it to its owner; Meggy, his wife, took care of that.  It made its reappearance in Thrums, several months after the riot, as two pairs of Sabbath breeks for her sons, James and Andrew.

CHAPTER X.

First sermon against women.

On the afternoon of the following Sabbath, as I have said, something strange happened in the Auld Licht pulpit.  The congregation, despite their troubles, turned it over and peered at it for days, but had they seen into the inside of it they would have weaved few webs until the session had sat on the minister.  The affair baffled me at the time, and for the Egyptian’s sake I would avoid mentioning it now, were it not one of Gavin’s milestones.  It includes the first of his memorable sermons against Woman.

I was not in the Auld Licht church that day, but I heard of the sermon before night, and this, I think, is as good an opportunity as another for showing how the gossip about Gavin reached me up here in the Glen school-house.  Since Margaret and her son came to the manse I had kept the vow made to myself and avoided Thrums.  Only once had I ventured to the kirk, and then, instead of taking my old seat, the fourth from the pulpit, I sat down near the plate, where I could look at Margaret without her seeing me.  To spare her that agony I even stole away as the last word of the benediction was pronounced, and my haste scandalised many, for with Auld Lichts it is not customary to retire quickly from the church after the manner of the godless U. P.’s (and the Free Kirk is little better), who have their hats in their hand when they rise for the benediction, so that they may at once pour out like a burst dam.  We resume our seats, look straight before us, clear our throats and stretch out our hands for our womenfolk to put our hats into them.  In time we do get out, but I am never sure how.

One may gossip in a glen on Sabbaths, though not in a town, without losing his character, and I used to await the return of my neighbour, the farmer of Waster Lunny, and of Silva Birse, the Glen Quharity post, at the end of the school-house path.  Waster Lunny was a man whose care in his leisure hours was to keep from his wife his great pride in her.  His horse, Catlaw, on the other hand, he told outright what he thought of it, praising it to its face and blackguarding it as it deserved, and I have seen him when completely baffled by the brute, sit down before it on a stone and thus harangue:  “You think you’re clever, Catlaw, my lass, but you’re mista’en.  You’re a thrawn limmer, that’s what you are.  You think you have blood in you.  You hae blood!  Gae away, and dinna blether.  I tell you what, Catlaw, I met a man yestreen that kent your mither, and he says she was a feikie fushionless besom.  What do you say to that?”