“Ony explanation o’ his sudden change o’ texts?’ Birse said, repeating my question.  “Tod, and there is and to spare, for I hear tell there’s saxteen explanations in the Tenements alone.  As Tammas Haggart says, that’s a blessing, for if there had just been twa explanations the kirk micht hae split on them.”

“Ay,” he said at another time, “twa or three even dared to question the minister, but I’m thinking they made nothing o’t.  The majority agrees that he was just inspired to change his text.  But Lang Tammas is dour.  Tammas telled the session a queer thing.  He says that after the diet o’ worship on that eventful afternoon Mr. Dishart carried the Bible out o’ the pulpit instead o’ leaving that duty as usual to the kirk-officer.  Weel, Tammas, being precentor, has a richt, as you ken, to leave the kirk by the session-house door, just like the minister himsel’.  He did so that afternoon, and what, think you, did he see?  He saw Mr. Dishart tearing a page out o’ the Bible, and flinging it savagely into the session-house fire.  You dinna credit it?  Weel, it’s staggering, but there’s Hendry Munn’s evidence too.  Hendry took his first chance o’ looking up Ezra in the minister’s Bible, and, behold, the page wi’ the eighth chapter was gone.  Them that thinks Tammas wasna blind wi’ excitement hauds it had been Ezra eighth that gaed into the fire.  Onyway, there’s no doubt about the page’s being missing, for whatever excitement Tammas was in, Hendry was as cool as ever.”

A week later Birse told me that the congregation had decided to regard the incident as adding lustre to their kirk.  This was largely, I fear, because it could then be used to belittle the Established minister.  That fervent Auld Licht, Snecky Hobart, feeling that Gavin’s action was unsound, had gone on the following Sabbath to the parish kirk and sat under Mr. Duthie.  But Mr. Duthie was a close reader, so that Snecky flung himself about in his pew in misery.  The minister concluded his sermon with these words:  “But on this subject I will say no more at present.”

“Because you canna,” Snecky roared, and strutted out of the church.  Comparing the two scenes, it is obvious that the Auld Lichts had won a victory.  After preaching impromptu for an hour and twenty-five minutes, it could never be said of Gavin that he needed to read.  He became more popular than ever.  Yet the change of texts was not forgotten.  If in the future any other indictments were brought against him, it would certainly be pinned to them.

I marvelled long over Gavin’s jump from Ezra to Genesis, and at this his first philippic against Woman, but I have known the cause for many a year.  The Bible was the one that had lain on the summer-seat while the Egyptian hid there.  It was the great pulpit Bible which remains in the church as a rule, but Gavin had taken it home the previous day to make some of its loose pages secure with paste.  He had studied from it on the day preceding the riot, but had used a small Bible during the rest of the week.  When he turned in the pulpit to Ezra, where he had left the large Bible open in the summer-seat, he found this scrawled across chapter eight:—­