John Murchison had not said much about the sermon; it wasn’t his way, and Dr Drummond knew it.  “You gave us a good sermon last night, Doctor”; not much more than that, and “I noticed the Milburns there; we don’t often get Episcopalians”; and again, “The Wilcoxes”—­Thomas Wilcox, wholesale grocer, was the chief prop of St Andrew’s—­“were sitting just in front of us.  We overtook them going home, and Wilcox explained how much they liked the music.  ’Glad to see you,’ I said.  ‘Glad to see you for any reason,’” Mr Murchison’s eye twinkled.  “But they had a great deal to say about ‘the music.’” It was not an effusive form of felicitation; the minister would have liked it less if it had been, felt less justified, perhaps, in remembering about the range on that particular morning.  As it was, he was able to take it with perfect dignity and good humour, and to enjoy the point against the Wilcoxes with that laugh of his that did everybody good to hear; so hearty it was, so rich in the grain of the voice, so full of the zest and flavour of the joke.  The range had been selected, and their talk of changes had begun with it, Mr Murchison pointing out the new idea in the boiler and Dr Drummond remembering his first kitchen stove that burned wood and stood on its four legs, with nothing behind but the stove pipe, and if you wanted a boiler you took off the front lids and put it on, and how remarkable even that had seemed to his eyes, fresh from the conservative kitchen notions of the old country.  He had come, unhappily, a widower to the domestic improvements on the other side of the Atlantic.  “Often I used to think,” he said to Mr Murchison, “if my poor wife could have seen that stove how delighted she would have been!  But I doubt this would have been too much for her altogether!”

“That stove!” answered Mr Murchison.  “Well I remember it.  I sold it myself to your predecessor, Mr Wishart, for thirty dollars—­the last purchase he ever made, poor man.  It was great business for me—­I had only two others in the store like it.  One of them old Milburn bought—­the father of this man, d’ye mind him?—­the other stayed by me a matter of seven years.  I carried a light stock in those days.”

It was no longer a light stock.  The two men involuntarily glanced round them for the satisfaction of the contrast Murchison evoked, though neither of them, from motives of vague delicacy, felt inclined to dwell upon it.  John Murchison had the shyness of an artist in his commercial success, and the minister possibly felt that his relation toward the prosperity of a member had in some degree the embarrassment of a tax-gatherer’s.  The stock was indeed heavy now.  You had to go upstairs to see the ranges, where they stood in rows, and every one of them bore somewhere upon it, in raised black letters, John Murchison’s name.  Through the windows came the iterating ring on the iron from the foundry in Chestnut Street which fed the shop, with an overflow that found its way from one end of