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The Annals of the Parish

by John Galt · English · Gutenberg #1310 · 374,474 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Annals of the Parish

Author: John Galt


        
Release date: May 1, 1998 [eBook #1310]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2017

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1310

Credits: Transcribed from the 1910 T. N. Foulis edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ANNALS OF THE PARISH ***


Transcribed from the 1910 T. N. Foulis edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

                          [Picture: Book cover]

                     [Picture: The Loupin’-on Stane]





                                ANNALS OF
                                THE PARISH


                         OR THE CHRONICLE OF DAL-
                       MAILING DURING THE MINISTRY
                        OF THE REV. MICAH BALWHID-
                         DER.  WRITTEN BY HIMSELF
                        AND ARRANGED AND EDITED BY
                                JOHN GALT
                         ILLUSTRATED IN COLOUR BY
                          HENRY W. KERR, R.S.A.

                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]

                                T.N.FOULIS
                            London & Edinburgh
                                 1 9 1 0

                                * * * * *

                             _September_ 1910

                                * * * * *

               _Printed by Turnbull & Spears_, _Edinburgh_




INTRODUCTION


IN the same year, and on the same day of the same month, that his Sacred
Majesty King George, the third of the name, came to his crown and
kingdom, I was placed and settled as the minister of Dalmailing. {1}
When about a week thereafter this was known in the parish, it was thought
a wonderful thing, and everybody spoke of me and the new king as united
in our trusts and temporalities, marvelling how the same should come to
pass, and thinking the hand of Providence was in it, and that surely we
were preordained to fade and flourish in fellowship together; which has
really been the case: for in the same season that his Most Excellent
Majesty, as he was very properly styled in the proclamations for the
general fasts and thanksgivings, was set by as a precious vessel which
had received a crack or a flaw, and could only be serviceable in the way
of an ornament, I was obliged, by reason of age and the growing
infirmities of my recollection, to consent to the earnest entreaties of
the Session, and to accept of Mr. Amos to be my helper.  I was long
reluctant to do so; but the great respect that my people had for me, and
the love that I bore towards them, over and above the sign that was given
to me in the removal of the royal candle-stick from its place, worked
upon my heart and understanding, and I could not stand out.  So, on the
last Sabbath of the year 1810, I preached my last sermon, and it was a
moving discourse.  There were few dry eyes in the kirk that day; for I
had been with the aged from the beginning—the young considered me as
their natural pastor—and my bidding them all farewell was, as when of old
among the heathen, an idol was taken away by the hands of the enemy.

At the close of the worship, and before the blessing, I addressed them in
a fatherly manner; and, although the kirk was fuller than ever I saw it
before, the fall of a pin might have been heard—at the conclusion there
was a sobbing and much sorrow.  I said,

“My dear friends, I have now finished my work among you for ever.  I have
often spoken to you from this place the words of truth and holiness; and,
had it been in poor frail human nature to practise the advice and
counselling that I have given in this pulpit to you, there would not need
to be any cause for sorrow on this occasion—the close and latter end of
my ministry.  But, nevertheless, I have no reason to complain; and it
will be my duty to testify, in that place where I hope we are all one day
to meet again, that I found you a docile and a tractable flock, far more
than at first I could have expected.  There are among you still a few,
but with grey heads and feeble hands now, that can remember the great
opposition that was made to my placing, and the stout part they
themselves took in the burly, because I was appointed by the patron; but
they have lived to see the error of their way, and to know that preaching
is the smallest portion of the duties of a faithful minister.  I may not,
my dear friends, have applied my talent in the pulpit so effectually as
perhaps I might have done, considering the gifts that it pleased God to
give me in that way, and the education that I had in the Orthodox
University of Glasgow, as it was in the time of my youth; nor can I say
that, in the works of peace-making and charity, I have done all that I
should have done.  But I have done my best, studying no interest but the
good that was to rise according to the faith in Christ Jesus.

“To my young friends I would, as a parting word, say, look to the lives
and conversation of your parents—they were plain, honest, and devout
Christians, fearing God and honouring the King.  They believed the Bible
was the word of God; and, when they practised its precepts, they found,
by the good that came from them, that it was truly so.  They bore in mind
the tribulation and persecution of their forefathers for righteousness’
sake, and were thankful for the quiet and protection of the government in
their day and generation.  Their land was tilled with industry, and they
ate the bread of carefulness with a contented spirit, and, verily, they
had the reward of well-doing even in this world; for they beheld on all
sides the blessing of God upon the nation, and the tree growing, and the
plough going where the banner of the oppressor was planted of old, and
the war-horse trampled in the blood of martyrs.  Reflect on this, my
young friends, and know, that the best part of a Christian’s duty in this
world of much evil, is to thole and suffer with resignation, as lang as
it is possible for human nature to do.  I do not counsel passive
obedience: that is a doctrine that the Church of Scotland can never
abide; but the divine right of resistance, which, in the days of her
trouble, she so bravely asserted against popish and prelatic usurpations,
was never resorted to till the attempt was made to remove the ark of the
tabernacle from her.  I therefore counsel you, my young friends, not to
lend your ears to those that trumpet forth their hypothetical politics;
but to believe that the laws of the land are administered with a good
intent, till in your own homes and dwellings ye feel the presence of the
oppressor—then, and not till then, are ye free to gird your loins for
battle—and woe to him, and woe to the land where that is come to, if the
sword be sheathed till the wrong be redressed.

“As for you, my old companions, many changes have we seen in our day; but
the change that we ourselves are soon to undergo will be the greatest of
all.  We have seen our bairns grow to manhood—we have seen the beauty of
youth pass away—we have felt our backs become unable for the burthen, and
our right hand forget its cunning.—Our eyes have become dim, and our
heads grey—we are now tottering with short and feckless steps towards the
grave; and some, that should have been here this day, are bed-rid, lying,
as it were, at the gates of death, like Lazarus at the threshold of the
rich man’s door, full of ails and sores, and having no enjoyment but in
the hope that is in hereafter.  What can I say to you but farewell!  Our
work is done—we are weary and worn out, and in need of rest—may the rest
of the blessed be our portion!—and in the sleep that all must sleep,
beneath the cold blanket of the kirkyard grass, and on that clay pillow
where we must shortly lay our heads, may we have pleasant dreams, till we
are awakened to partake of the everlasting banquet of the saints in
glory!”

When I had finished, there was for some time a great solemnity throughout
the kirk; and, before giving the blessing, I sat down to compose myself,
for my heart was big, and my spirit oppressed with sadness.

As I left the pulpit, all the elders stood on the steps to hand me down,
and the tear was in every eye, and they helped me into the session-house;
but I could not speak to them, nor them to me.  Then Mr. Dalziel, who was
always a composed and sedate man, said a few words of prayer, and I was
comforted therewith, and rose to go home to the manse; but in the
churchyard all the congregation was assembled, young and old, and they
made a lane for me to the back-yett that opened into the
manse-garden—Some of them put out their hands and touched me as I passed,
followed by the elders, and some of them wept.  It was as if I was
passing away, and to be no more—verily, it was the reward of my
ministry—a faithful account of which, year by year, I now sit down, in
the evening of my days, to make up, to the end that I may bear witness to
the work of a beneficent Providence, even in the narrow sphere of my
parish, and the concerns of that flock of which it was His most gracious
pleasure to make me the unworthy shepherd.




CHAPTER I
YEAR 1760


THE Anno Domini one thousand seven hundred and sixty, was remarkable for
three things in the parish of Dalmailing.—First and foremost, there was
my placing; then the coming of Mrs. Malcolm with her five children to
settle among us; and next, my marriage upon my own cousin, Miss Betty
Lanshaw, by which the account of this year naturally divides itself into
three heads or portions.

First, of the placing.—It was a great affair; for I was put in by the
patron, and the people knew nothing whatsoever of me, and their hearts
were stirred into strife on the occasion, and they did all that lay
within the compass of their power to keep me out, insomuch, that there
was obliged to be a guard of soldiers to protect the presbytery; and it
was a thing that made my heart grieve when I heard the drum beating and
the fife playing as we were going to the kirk.  The people were really
mad and vicious, and flung dirt upon us as we passed, and reviled us all,
and held out the finger of scorn at me; but I endured it with a resigned
spirit, compassionating their wilfulness and blindness.  Poor old Mr.
Kilfuddy of the Braehill got such a clash of glar on the side of his
face, that his eye was almost extinguished.

When we got to the kirk door, it was found to be nailed up, so as by no
possibility to be opened.  The sergeant of the soldiers wanted to break
it, but I was afraid that the heritors would grudge and complain of the
expense of a new door, and I supplicated him to let it be as it was: we
were, therefore, obligated to go in by a window, and the crowd followed
us in the most unreverent manner, making the Lord’s house like an inn on
a fair day, with their grievous yellyhooing.  During the time of the
psalm and the sermon, they behaved themselves better, but when the
induction came on, their clamour was dreadful; and Thomas Thorl, the
weaver, a pious zealot in that time, he got up and protested, and said,
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that entereth not by the door into
the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a
robber.”  And I thought I would have a hard and sore time of it with such
an outstrapolous people.  Mr. Given, that was then the minister of
Lugton, was a jocose man, and would have his joke even at a solemnity.
When the laying of the hands upon me was adoing, he could not get near
enough to put on his, but he stretched out his staff and touched my head,
and said, to the great diversion of the rest, “This will do well enough,
timber to timber;” but it was an unfriendly saying of Mr. Given,
considering the time and the place, and the temper of my people.

                          [Picture: The Souter]

After the ceremony, we then got out at the window, and it was a heavy day
to me; but we went to the manse, and there we had an excellent dinner,
which Mrs. Watts of the new inns of Irville {9} prepared at my request,
and sent her chaise-driver to serve, for he was likewise her waiter, she
having then but one chaise, and that no often called for.

But, although my people received me in this unruly manner, I was resolved
to cultivate civility among them, and therefore, the very next morning I
began a round of visitations; but, oh! it was a steep brae that I had to
climb, and it needed a stout heart.  For I found the doors in some places
barred against me; in others, the bairns, when they saw me coming, ran
crying to their mothers, “Here’s the feckless Mess-John!” and then, when
I went into the houses, their parents wouldna ask me to sit down, but
with a scornful way, said, “Honest man, what’s your pleasure here?”
Nevertheless, I walked about from door to door like a dejected beggar,
till I got the almous deed of a civil reception—and who would have
thought it?—from no less a person than the same Thomas Thorl that was so
bitter against me in the kirk on the foregoing day.

Thomas was standing at the door with his green duffle apron, and his red
Kilmarnock nightcap—I mind him as well as if it was but yesterday—and he
had seen me going from house to house, and in what manner I was rejected,
and his bowels were moved, and he said to me in a kind manner, “Come in,
sir, and ease yoursel’: this will never do, the clergy are God’s gorbies,
and for their Master’s sake it behoves us to respect them.  There was no
ane in the whole parish mair against you than mysel’; but this early
visitation is a symptom of grace that I couldna have expectit from a bird
out the nest of patronage.”  I thanked Thomas, and went in with him, and
we had some solid conversation together, and I told him that it was not
so much the pastor’s duty to feed the flock, as to herd them well; and
that, although there might be some abler with the head than me, there
wasna a he within the bounds of Scotland more willing to watch the fold
by night and by day.  And Thomas said he had not heard a mair sound
observe for some time, and that, if I held to that doctrine in the
poopit, it wouldna be lang till I would work a change.—“I was mindit,”
quoth he, “never to set my foot within the kirk door while you were
there; but to testify, and no to condemn without a trial, I’ll be there
next Lord’s day, and egg my neighbours to be likewise, so ye’ll no have
to preach just to the bare walls and the laird’s family.”

I have now to speak of the coming of Mrs. Malcolm.—She was the widow of a
Clyde shipmaster, that was lost at sea with his vessel.  She was a genty
body, calm and methodical.  From morning to night she sat at her wheel,
spinning the finest lint, which suited well with her pale hands.  She
never changed her widow’s weeds, and she was aye as if she had just been
ta’en out of a bandbox.  The tear was aften in her e’e when the bairns
were at the school; but when they came home, her spirit was lighted up
with gladness, although, poor woman, she had many a time very little to
give them.  They were, however, wonderful well-bred things, and took with
thankfulness whatever she set before them; for they knew that their
father, the breadwinner, was away, and that she had to work sore for
their bit and drap.  I dare say, the only vexation that ever she had from
any of them, on their own account, was when Charlie, the eldest laddie,
had won fourpence at pitch-and-toss at the school, which he brought home
with a proud heart to his mother.  I happened to be daunrin’ by at the
time, and just looked in at the door to say gude-night: it was a sad
sight.  There was she sitting with the silent tear on her cheek, and
Charlie greeting as if he had done a great fault, and the other four
looking on with sorrowful faces.  Never, I am sure, did Charlie Malcolm
gamble after that night.

I often wondered what brought Mrs. Malcolm to our clachan, instead of
going to a populous town, where she might have taken up a huxtry-shop, as
she was but of a silly constitution, the which would have been better for
her than spinning from morning to far in the night, as if she was in
verity drawing the thread of life.  But it was, no doubt, from an honest
pride to hide her poverty; for when her daughter Effie was ill with the
measles—the poor lassie was very ill—nobody thought she could come
through, and when she did get the turn, she was for many a day a heavy
handful;—our session being rich, and nobody on it but cripple Tammy
Daidles, that was at that time known through all the country side for
begging on a horse, I thought it my duty to call upon Mrs. Malcolm in a
sympathising way, and offer her some assistance, but she refused it.

“No, sir,” said she, “I canna take help from the poor’s-box, although
it’s very true that I am in great need; for it might hereafter be cast up
to my bairns, whom it may please God to restore to better circumstances
when I am no to see’t; but I would fain borrow five pounds, and if, sir,
you will write to Mr. Maitland, that is now the Lord Provost of Glasgow,
and tell him that Marion Shaw would be obliged to him for the lend of
that soom, I think he will not fail to send it.”

I wrote the letter that night to Provost Maitland, and, by the retour of
the post, I got an answer, with twenty pounds for Mrs. Malcolm, saying,
“That it was with sorrow he heard so small a trifle could be
serviceable.”  When I took the letter and the money, which was in a
bank-bill, she said, “This is just like himsel’.”  She then told me that
Mr. Maitland had been a gentleman’s son of the east country, but driven
out of his father’s house, when a laddie, by his stepmother; and that he
had served as a servant lad with her father, who was the Laird of
Yillcogie, but ran through his estate, and left her, his only daughter,
in little better than beggary with her auntie, the mother of Captain
Malcolm, her husband that was.  Provost Maitland in his servitude had
ta’en a notion of her; and when he recovered his patrimony, and had
become a great Glasgow merchant, on hearing how she was left by her
father, he offered to marry her, but she had promised herself to her
cousin the captain, whose widow she was.  He then married a rich lady,
and in time grew, as he was, Lord Provost of the city; but his letter
with the twenty pounds to me, showed that he had not forgotten his first
love.  It was a short, but a well-written letter, in a fair hand of
write, containing much of the true gentleman; and Mrs. Malcolm said, “Who
knows but out of the regard he once had for their mother, he may do
something for my five helpless orphans.”

Thirdly, Upon the subject of taking my cousin, Miss Betty Lanshaw, for my
first wife, I have little to say.—It was more out of a compassionate
habitual affection, than the passion of love.  We were brought up by our
grandmother in the same house, and it was a thing spoken of from the
beginning, that Betty and me were to be married.  So, when she heard that
the Laird of Breadland had given me the presentation of Dalmailing, she
began to prepare for the wedding; and as soon as the placing was well
over, and the manse in order, I gaed to Ayr, where she was, and we were
quietly married, and came home in a chaise, bringing with us her little
brother Andrew, that died in the East Indies, and he lived and was
brought up by us.

Now, this is all, I think, that happened in that year worthy of being
mentioned, except that at the sacrament, when old Mr. Kilfuddy was
preaching in the tent, it came on such a thunder-plump, that there was
not a single soul stayed in the kirkyard to hear him; for the which he
was greatly mortified, and never after came to our preachings.




CHAPTER II
YEAR 1761


IT was in this year that the great smuggling trade corrupted all the west
coast, especially the laigh lands about the Troon and the Loans.  The tea
was going like the chaff, the brandy like well-water, and the wastrie of
all things was terrible.  There was nothing minded but the riding of
cadgers by day, and excisemen by night—and battles between the smugglers
and the king’s men, both by sea and land.  There was a continual
drunkenness and debauchery; and our session, that was but on the lip of
this whirlpool of iniquity, had an awful time o’t.  I did all that was in
the power of nature to keep my people from the contagion: I preached
sixteen times from the text, “Render to Cæsar the things that are
Cæsar’s.”  I visited, and I exhorted; I warned, and I prophesied; I told
them that, although the money came in like sclate stones, it would go
like the snow off the dyke.  But for all I could do, the evil got in
among us, and we had no less than three contested bastard bairns upon our
hands at one time, which was a thing never heard of in a parish of the
shire of Ayr since the Reformation.  Two of the bairns, after no small
sifting and searching, we got fathered at last; but the third, that was
by Meg Glaiks, and given to one Rab Rickerton, was utterly refused,
though the fact was not denied; but he was a termagant fellow, and
snappit his fingers at the elders.  The next day he listed in the Scotch
Greys, who were then quartered at Ayr, and we never heard more of him,
but thought he had been slain in battle, till one of the parish, about
three years since, went up to London to lift a legacy from a cousin that
died among the Hindoos.  When he was walking about, seeing the
curiosities, and among others Chelsea Hospital, he happened to speak to
some of the invalids, who found out from his tongue that he was a
Scotchman; and speaking to the invalids, one of them, a very old man,
with a grey head and a leg of timber, inquired what part of Scotland he
was come from; and when he mentioned my parish, the invalid gave a great
shout, and said he was from the same place himself; and who should this
old man be, but the very identical Rab Rickerton, that was art and part
in Meg Glaiks’ disowned bairn.  Then they had a long converse together,
and he had come through many hardships, but had turned out a good
soldier; and so, in his old days, was an indoor pensioner, and very
comfortable; and he said that he had, to be sure, spent his youth in the
devil’s service, and his manhood in the king’s, but his old age was given
to that of his Maker, which I was blithe and thankful to hear; and he
enquired about many a one in the parish, the blooming and the green of
his time, but they were all dead and buried; and he had a contrite and
penitent spirit, and read his Bible every day, delighting most in the
Book of Joshua, the Chronicles, and the Kings.

Before this year, the drinking of tea was little known in the parish,
saving among a few of the heritors’ houses on a Sabbath evening; but now
it became very rife: yet the commoner sort did not like to let it be
known that they were taking to the new luxury, especially the elderly
women, who, for that reason, had their ploys in out-houses and by-places,
just as the witches lang syne had their sinful possets and
galravitchings; and they made their tea for common in the pint-stoup, and
drank it out of caps and luggies, for there were but few among them that
had cups and saucers.  Well do I remember one night in harvest, in this
very year, as I was taking my twilight dauner aneath the hedge along the
back side of Thomas Thorl’s yard, meditating on the goodness of
Providence, and looking at the sheaves of victual on the field, that I
heard his wife, and two three other carlins, with their Bohea in the
inside of the hedge, and no doubt but it had a lacing of the conek, {17}
for they were all cracking like pen-guns.  But I gave them a sign, by a
loud host, that Providence sees all, and it skailed the bike; for I heard
them, like guilty creatures, whispering, and gathering up their
truck-pots and trenchers, and cowering away home.

It was in this year that Patrick Dilworth (he had been schoolmaster of
the parish from the time, as his wife said, of Anna Regina, and before
the Rexes came to the crown), was disabled by a paralytic, and the
heritors, grudging the cost of another schoolmaster as long as he lived,
would not allow the session to get his place supplied, which was a wrong
thing, I must say, of them; for the children of the parishioners were
obliged, therefore, to go to the neighbouring towns for their schooling,
and the custom was to take a piece of bread and cheese in their pockets
for dinner, and to return in the evening always voracious for more, the
long walk helping the natural crave of their young appetites.  In this
way Mrs. Malcolm’s two eldest laddies, Charlie and Robert, were wont to
go to Irville, and it was soon seen that they kept themselves aloof from
the other callans in the clachan, and had a genteeler turn than the
grulshy bairns of the cottars.  Her bit lassies, Kate and Effie, were
better off; for some years before, Nanse Banks had taken up a teaching in
a garret-room of a house, at the corner where John Bayne has biggit the
sclate-house for his grocery-shop.  Nanse learnt them reading and working
stockings, and how to sew the semplar, for twal-pennies a-week.  She was
a patient creature, well cut out for her calling, with blear een, a pale
face, and a long neck, but meek and contented withal, tholing the dule of
this world with a Christian submission of the spirit; and her garret-room
was a cordial of cleanliness, for she made the scholars set the house in
order, time and time about, every morning; and it was a common remark for
many a day, that the lassies, who had been at Nanse Banks’s school, were
always well spoken of, both for their civility, and the trigness of their
houses when they were afterwards married.  In short, I do not know, that
in all the long epoch of my ministry, any individual body did more to
improve the ways of the parishioners, in their domestic concerns, than
did that worthy and innocent creature, Nanse Banks, the schoolmistress;
and she was a great loss when she was removed, as it is to be hoped, to a
better world; but anent this I shall have to speak more at large
hereafter.

It was in this year that my patron, the Laird of Breadland, departed this
life, and I preached his funeral sermon; but he was non-beloved in the
parish; for my people never forgave him for putting me upon them,
although they began to be more on a familiar footing with myself.  This
was partly owing to my first wife, Betty Lanshaw, who was an active
throughgoing woman, and wonderfu’ useful to many of the cottars’ wives at
their lying-in; and when a death happened among them, her helping hand,
and any thing we had at the manse, was never wanting; and I went about
myself to the bedsides of the frail, leaving no stone unturned to win the
affections of my people, which, by the blessing of the Lord, in process
of time, was brought to a bearing.

But a thing happened in this year, which deserves to be recorded, as
manifesting what effect the smuggling was beginning to take in the morals
of the country side.  One Mr. Macskipnish, of Highland parentage, who had
been a valet-de-chambre with a major in the campaigns, and taken a
prisoner with him by the French, he having come home in a cartel, took up
a dancing-school at Irville, the which art he had learnt in the
genteelest fashion, in the mode of Paris, at the French court.  Such a
thing as a dancing-school had never, in the memory of man, been known in
our country side; and there was such a sound about the steps and
cottillions of Mr. Macskipnish, that every lad and lass, that could spare
time and siller, went to him, to the great neglect of their work.  The
very bairns on the loan, instead of their wonted play, gaed linking and
louping in the steps of Mr. Macskipnish, who was, to be sure, a great
curiosity, with long spindle legs, his breast shot out like a duck’s, and
his head powdered and frizzled up like a tappit-hen.  He was, indeed, the
proudest peacock that could be seen, and he had a ring on his finger, and
when he came to drink his tea at the Breadland, he brought no hat on his
head, but a droll cockit thing under his arm, which, he said, was after
the manner of the courtiers at the petty suppers of one Madam Pompadour,
who was at that time the concubine of the French king.

I do not recollect any other remarkable thing that happened in this year.
The harvest was very abundant, and the meal so cheap, that it caused a
great defect in my stipend; so that I was obligated to postpone the
purchase of a mahogany scrutoire for my study, as I had intended.  But I
had not the heart to complain of this: on the contrary, I rejoiced
thereat; for what made me want my scrutoire till another year, had
carried blitheness into the hearth of the cottar, and made the widow’s
heart sing with joy; and I would have been an unnatural creature, had I
not joined in the universal gladness, because plenty did abound.




CHAPTER III
YEAR 1762


THE third year of my ministry was long held in remembrance for several
very memorable things.  William Byres of the Loanhead had a cow that
calved two calves at one calving; Mrs. Byres, the same year, had twins,
male and female; and there was such a crop on his fields, testifying that
the Lord never sends a mouth into the world without providing meat for
it.  But what was thought a very daunting sign of something, happened on
the Sacrament Sabbath at the conclusion of the action sermon, when I had
made a very suitable discourse.  The day was tempestuous, and the wind
blew with such a pith and birr, that I thought it would have twirled the
trees in the kirkyard out by the roots, and, blowing in this manner, it
tirled the thack from the rigging of the manse stable; and the same blast
that did that, took down the lead that was on the kirk-roof, which hurled
off, as I was saying, at the conclusion of the action sermon, with such a
dreadful sound, as the like was never heard, and all the congregation
thought that it betokened a mutation to me.  However, nothing particular
happened to me; but the smallpox came in among the weans of the parish,
and the smashing that it made of the poor bits o’ bairns was indeed
woeful.

One Sabbath, when the pestilence was raging, I preached a sermon about
Rachel weeping for her children, which Thomas Thorl, who was surely a
great judge of good preaching, said, “was a monument of divinity whilk
searched the heart of many a parent that day;” a thing I was well pleased
to hear, for Thomas, as I have related at length, was the most zealous
champion against my getting the parish; but, from this time, I set him
down in my mind for the next vacancy among the elders.  Worthy man! it
was not permitted him to arrive at that honour.  In the fall of that year
he took an income in his legs, and couldna go about, and was laid up for
the remainder of his days, a perfect Lazarus, by the fire-side.  But he
was well supported in his affliction.  In due season, when it pleased Him
that alone can give and take, to pluck him from this life, as the fruit
ripened and ready for the gathering, his death, to all that knew him, was
a gentle dispensation, for truly he had been in sore trouble.

It was in this year that Charlie Malcolm, Mrs. Malcolm’s eldest son, was
sent to be a cabin-boy in the Tobacco trader, a three-masted ship, that
sailed between Port-Glasgow and Virginia in America.  She was commanded
by Captain Dickie, an Irville man; for at that time the Clyde was
supplied with the best sailors from our coast, the coal-trade with
Ireland being a better trade for bringing up good mariners than the long
voyages in the open sea; which was the reason, as I often heard said, why
the Clyde shipping got so many of their men from our country side.  The
going to sea of Charlie Malcolm was, on divers accounts, a very
remarkable thing to us all; for he was the first that ever went from our
parish, in the memory of man, to be a sailor, and everybody was concerned
at it, and some thought it was a great venture of his mother to let him,
his father having been lost at sea.  But what could the forlorn widow do?
She had five weans, and little to give them; and, as she herself said, he
was aye in the hand of his Maker, go where he might; and the will of God
would be done, in spite of all earthly wiles and devices to the contrary.

                    [Picture: Preparing for the Kirk]

On the Monday morning, when Charlie was to go away to meet the Irville
carrier on the road, we were all up, and I walked by myself from the
manse into the clachan to bid him farewell, and I met him just coming
from his mother’s door, as blithe as a bee, in his sailor’s dress, with a
stick, and a bundle tied in a Barcelona silk handkerchief hanging o’er
his shoulder, and his two little brothers were with him, and his sisters,
Kate and Effie, looking out from the door all begreeten; but his mother
was in the house, praying to the Lord to protect her orphan, as she
afterwards told me.  All the weans of the clachan were gathered at the
kirkyard yett to see him pass, and they gave him three great shouts as he
was going by; and everybody was at their doors, and said something
encouraging to him; but there was a great laugh when auld Mizy Spaewell
came hirpling with her bauchle in her hand, and flung it after him for
good-luck.  Mizy had a wonderful faith in freats, and was just an oracle
of sagacity at expounding dreams, and bodes of every sort and
description—besides, she was reckoned one of the best howdies in her day;
but by this time she was grown frail and feckless, and she died the same
year on Hallowe’en, which made everybody wonder that it should have so
fallen out for her to die on Hallowe’en.

Shortly after the departure of Charlie Malcolm, the Lady of Breadland,
with her three daughters, removed to Edinburgh, where the young laird,
that had been my pupil, was learning to be an advocate, and the
Breadland-house was set to Major Gilchrist, a nabob from India; but he
was a narrow ailing man, and his maiden-sister, Miss Girzie, was the
scrimpetest creature that could be; so that, in their hands, all the
pretty policy of the Breadlands, that had cost a power of money to the
old laird that was my patron, fell into decay and disorder; and the bonny
yew-trees that were cut into the shape of peacocks, soon grew out of all
shape, and are now doleful monuments of the major’s tack, and that of
Lady Skimmilk, as Miss Girzie Gilchrist, his sister, was nick-named by
every ane that kent her.

But it was not so much on account of the neglect of the Breadland, that
the incoming of Major Gilchrist was to be deplored.  The old men that had
a light labour in keeping the policy in order, were thrown out of bread,
and could do little; and the poor women that whiles got a bit and a drap
from the kitchen of the family, soon felt the change, so that by little
and little we were obligated to give help from the session; insomuch
that, before the end of the year, I was necessitated to preach a
discourse on almsgiving, specially for the benefit of our own poor, a
thing never before known in the parish.

But one good thing came from the Gilchrists to Mrs. Malcolm.  Miss
Girzie, whom they called Lady Skimmilk, had been in a very penurious way
as a seamstress, in the Gorbals of Glasgow, while her brother was making
the fortune in India, and she was a clever needle-woman—none better, as
it was said; and she, having some things to make, took Kate Malcolm to
help her in the coarse work; and Kate, being a nimble and birky thing,
was so useful to the lady, and the complaining man the major, that they
invited her to stay with them at the Breadland for the winter, where,
although she was holden to her seam from morning to night, her food
lightened the hand of her mother, who, for the first time since her
coming into the parish, found the penny for the day’s darg more than was
needed for the meal-basin; and the tea-drinking was beginning to spread
more openly, insomuch that, by the advice of the first Mrs. Balwhidder,
Mrs. Malcolm took in tea to sell, and in this way was enabled to eke
something to the small profits of her wheel.  Thus the tide that had been
so long ebbing to her, began to turn; and here I am bound in truth to
say, that although I never could abide the smuggling, both on its own
account, and the evils that grew therefrom to the country side, I lost
some of my dislike to the tea after Mrs. Malcolm began to traffic in it,
and we then had it for our breakfast in the morning at the manse, as well
as in the afternoon.  But what I thought most of it for was, that it did
no harm to the head of the drinkers, which was not always the case with
the possets that were in fashion before.  There is no meeting now in the
summer evenings, as I remember often happened in my younger days, with
decent ladies coming home with red faces, tosy and cosh, from a
posset-masking; so, both for its temperance and on account of Mrs.
Malcolm’s sale, I refrained from the November in this year to preach
against tea; but I never lifted the weight of my displeasure from off the
smuggling trade, until it was utterly put down by the strong hand of
government.

There was no other thing of note in this year, saving only that I planted
in the garden the big pear-tree, which had the two great branches that we
call the Adam and Eve.  I got the plant, then a sapling, from Mr. Graft,
that was Lord Eaglesham’s head-gardener; and he said it was, as indeed
all the parish now knows well, a most juicy sweet pear, such as was not
known in Scotland till my lord brought down the father plant from the
king’s garden in London, in the forty-five when he went up to testify his
loyalty to the House of Hanover.




CHAPTER IV
YEAR 1763


THE An. Dom. 1763, was, in many a respect, a memorable year, both in
public and in private.  The King granted peace to the French, and Charlie
Malcolm, that went to sea in the Tobacco trader, came home to see his
mother.  The ship, after being at America, had gone down to Jamaica, an
island in the West Indies, with a cargo of live lumber, as Charlie told
me himself, and had come home with more than a hundred and fifty hoggits
of sugar, and sixty-three puncheons full of rum; for she was, by all
accounts, a stately galley, and almost two hundred tons in the burthen,
being the largest vessel then sailing from the creditable town of
Port-Glasgow.  Charlie was not expected; and his coming was a great thing
to us all, so I will mention the whole particulars.

One evening, towards the gloaming, as I was taking my walk of meditation,
I saw a brisk sailor laddie coming towards me.  He had a pretty green
parrot sitting on a bundle, tied in a Barcelona silk handkerchief, which
he carried with a stick over his shoulder, and in this bundle was a
wonderful big nut, such as no one in our parish had ever seen.  It was
called a cocker-nut.  This blithe callant was Charlie Malcolm, who had
come all the way that day his leeful lane, on his own legs from Greenock,
where the Tobacco trader was then ’livering her cargo.  I told him how
his mother, and his brothers, and his sisters were all in good health,
and went to convoy him home; and as we were going along, he told me many
curious things, and he gave me six beautiful yellow limes, that he had
brought in his pouch all the way across the seas, for me to make a bowl
of punch with, and I thought more of them than if they had been golden
guineas, it was so mindful of the laddie.

When we got to the door of his mother’s house, she was sitting at the
fireside, with her three other bairns at their bread and milk, Kate being
then with Lady Skimmilk, at the Breadland, sewing.  It was between the
day and dark, when the shuttle stands still till the lamp is lighted.
But such a shout of joy and thankfulness as rose from that hearth, when
Charlie went in!  The very parrot, ye would have thought, was a
participator, for the beast gied a skraik that made my whole head dirl;
and the neighbours came flying and flocking to see what was the matter,
for it was the first parrot ever seen within the bounds of the parish,
and some thought it was but a foreign hawk, with a yellow head and green
feathers.

In the midst of all this, Effie Malcolm had run off to the Breadland for
her sister Kate, and the two lassies came flying breathless, with Miss
Girzie Gilchrist, the Lady Skimmilk, pursuing them like desperation, or a
griffin, down the avenue; for Kate, in her hurry, had flung down her
seam, a new printed gown, that she was helping to make, and it had fallen
into a boyne of milk that was ready for the creaming, by which issued a
double misfortune to Miss Girzie, the gown being not only ruined, but
licking up the cream.  For this, poor Kate was not allowed ever to set
her face in the Breadland again.

When Charlie Malcolm had stayed about a week with his mother, he returned
to his berth in the Tobacco trader, and shortly after his brother Robert
was likewise sent to serve his time to the sea, with an owner that was
master of his own bark, in the coal trade at Irville.  Kate, who was
really a surprising lassie for her years, was taken off her mother’s
hands by the old Lady Macadam, that lived in her jointure house, which is
now the Cross Keys Inn.  Her ladyship was a woman of high breeding, her
husband having been a great general, and knighted by the king for his
exploits; but she was lame, and could not move about in her dining-room
without help; so hearing from the first Mrs. Balwhidder how Kate had done
such an unatonable deed to Miss Girzie Gilchrist, she sent for Kate, and,
finding her sharp and apt, she took her to live with her as a companion.
This was a vast advantage, for the lady was versed in all manner of
accomplishments, and could read and speak French with more ease than any
professor at that time in the College of Glasgow; and she had learnt to
sew flowers on satin, either in a nunnery abroad, or in a boarding-school
in England, and took pleasure in teaching Kate all she knew, and how to
behave herself like a lady.

In the summer of this year, old Mr. Patrick Dilworth, that had so long
been doited with the paralytics, died, and it was a great relief to my
people, for the heritors could no longer refuse to get a proper
schoolmaster; so we took on trial Mr. Lorimore, who has ever since the
year after, with so much credit to himself, and usefulness to the parish,
been schoolmaster, session clerk, and precentor—a man of great mildness
and extraordinary particularity.  He was then a very young man, and some
objection was made, on account of his youth, to his being session-clerk,
especially as the smuggling immorality still gave us much trouble in the
making up of irregular marriages; but his discretion was greater than
could have been hoped for from his years; and, after a twelvemonth’s
probation in the capacity of schoolmaster, he was installed in all the
offices that had belonged to his predecessor, old Mr. Patrick Dilworth
that was.

But the most memorable thing that befell among my people this year, was
the burning of the lint-mill on the Lugton water, which happened, of all
the days of the year, on the very selfsame day that Miss Girzie
Gilchrist, better known as Lady Skimmilk, hired the chaise from Mrs.
Watts of the New Inns of Irville, to go with her brother, the major, to
consult the faculty in Edinburgh concerning his complaints.  For, as the
chaise was coming by the mill, William Huckle, the miller that was, came
flying out of the mill like a demented man, crying fire!—and it was the
driver that brought the melancholy tidings to the clachan—and melancholy
they were; for the mill was utterly destroyed, and in it not a little of
all that year’s crop of lint in our parish.  The first Mrs. Balwhidder
lost upwards of twelve stone, which we had raised on the glebe with no
small pains, watering it in the drouth, as it was intended for sarking to
ourselves, and sheets and napery.  A great loss indeed it was, and the
vexation thereof had a visible effect on Mrs. Balwhidder’s health, which
from the spring had been in a dwining way.  But for it, I think she might
have wrestled through the winter: however, it was ordered otherwise, and
she was removed from mine to Abraham’s bosom on Christmas-day, and buried
on Hogmanay, for it was thought uncanny to have a dead corpse in the
house on the new-year’s day.  She was a worthy woman, studying with all
her capacity to win the hearts of my people towards me—in the which good
work she prospered greatly; so that, when she died, there was not a
single soul in the parish that was not contented with both my walk and
conversation.  Nothing could be more peaceable than the way we lived
together.  Her brother Andrew, a fine lad, I had sent to the college at
Glasgow, at my own cost; and when he came out to the burial, he stayed
with me a month, for the manse after her decease was very dull, and it
was during this visit that he gave me an inkling of his wish to go out to
India as a cadet, but the transactions anent that fall within the scope
of another year—as well as what relates to her headstone, and the epitaph
in metre, which I indicated myself thereon; John Truel the mason carving
the same, as may be seen in the kirkyard, where it wants a little
reparation and setting upright, having settled the wrong way when the
second Mrs. Balwhidder was laid by her side.—But I must not here enter
upon an anticipation.




CHAPTER V
YEAR 1764


THIS year well deserved the name of the monumental year in our parish;
for the young laird of the Breadland, that had been my pupil, being
learning to be an advocate among the faculty in Edinburgh, with his lady
mother, who had removed thither with the young ladies her daughters, for
the benefit of education, sent out to be put up in the kirk, under the
loft over the family vault, an elegant marble headstone, with an epitaph
engraven thereon, in fair Latin, setting forth many excellent qualities
which the old laird, my patron that was, the inditer thereof said he
possessed.  I say the inditer, because it couldna have been the young
laird himself, although he got the credit o’t on the stone, for he was
nae daub in my aught at the Latin or any other language.  However, he
might improve himself at Edinburgh, where a’ manner of genteel things
were then to be got at an easy rate, and doubtless the young laird got a
probationer at the College to write the epitaph; but I have often
wondered sin’ syne, how he came to make it in Latin, for assuredly his
dead parent, if he could have seen it, could not have read a single word
o’t, notwithstanding it was so vaunty about his virtues, and other civil
and hospitable qualifications.

The coming of the laird’s monumental stone had a great effect on me, then
in a state of deep despondency for the loss of the first Mrs. Balwhidder;
and I thought I could not do a better thing, just by way of diversion in
my heavy sorrow, than to get a well-shapen headstone made for her—which,
as I have hinted at in the record of the last year, was done and set up.
But a headstone without an epitaph, is no better than a body without the
breath of life in’t; and so it behoved me to make a poesy for the
monument, the which I conned and pondered upon for many days.  I thought
as Mrs. Balwhidder, worthy woman as she was, did not understand the Latin
tongue, it would not do to put on what I had to say in that language, as
the laird had done—nor indeed would it have been easy, as I found upon
the experimenting, to tell what I had to tell in Latin, which is
naturally a crabbed language, and very difficult to write properly.  I
therefore, after mentioning her age and the dates of her birth and
departure, composed in sedate poetry the following epitaph, which may yet
be seen on the tombstone.

                                   EPITAPH

    A lovely Christian, spouse, and friend,
    Pleasant in life, and at her end.—
    A pale consumption dealt the blow
    That laid her here, with dust below.
    Sore was the cough that shook her frame;
    That cough her patience did proclaim—
    And as she drew her latest breath,
    She said, “The Lord is sweet in death.”
    O pious reader! standing by,
    Learn like this gentle one to die.
    The grass doth grow and fade away,
    And time runs out by night and day;
    The King of Terrors has command
    To strike us with his dart in hand.
    Go where we will by flood or field,
    He will pursue and make us yield.
    But though to him we must resign
    The vesture of our part divine,
    There is a jewel in our trust,
    That will not perish in the dust,
    A pearl of price, a precious gem,
    Ordained for Jesus’ diadem;
    Therefore, be holy while you can,
    And think upon the doom of man.
    Repent in time and sin no more,
    That when the strife of life is o’er,
    On wings of love your soul may rise,
    To dwell with angels in the skies,
    Where psalms are sung eternally,
    And martyrs ne’er again shall die;
    But with the saints still bask in bliss,
    And drink the cup of blessedness.

This was greatly thought of at the time, and Mr. Lorimore, who had a
nerve for poesy himself in his younger years, was of opinion that it was
so much to the purpose, and suitable withal, that he made his scholars
write it out for their examination copies, at the reading whereof before
the heritors, when the examination of the school came round, the tear
came into my eye, and every one present sympathized with me in my great
affliction for the loss of the first Mrs. Balwhidder.

Andrew Langshaw, as I have recorded, having come from the Glasgow College
to the burial of his sister, my wife that was, stayed with me a month to
keep me company; and staying with me, he was a great cordial, for the
weather was wet and sleety, and the nights were stormy, so that I could
go little out, and few of the elders came in, they being at that time old
men in a feckless condition, not at all qualified to warsle with the
blasts of winter.  But when Andrew left me to go back to his classes, I
was eerie and lonesome; and but for the getting of the monument ready,
which was a blessed entertainment to me in those dreary nights, with
consulting anent the shape of it with John Truel, and meditating on the
verse for the epitaph, I might have gone altogether demented.  However,
it pleased Him, who is the surety of the sinner, to help me through the
Slough of Despond, and to set my feet on firm land, establishing my way
thereon.

But the work of the monument, and the epitaph, could not endure for a
constancy, and after it was done, I was again in great danger of sinking
into the hypochonderies a second time.  However, I was enabled to fight
with my affliction, and by-and-by, as the spring began to open her green
lattice, and to set out her flower-pots to the sunshine, and the time of
the singing of birds was come, I became more composed, and like myself,
so I often walked in the fields, and held communion with nature, and
wondered at the mysteries thereof.

On one of these occasions, as I was sauntering along the edge of
Eaglesham-wood, looking at the industrious bee going from flower to
flower, and the idle butterfly, that layeth up no store, but perisheth
ere it is winter, I felt as it were a spirit from on high descending upon
me, a throb at my heart, and a thrill in my brain, and I was transported
out of myself, and seized with the notion of writing a book—but what it
should be about, I could not settle to my satisfaction.  Sometimes I
thought of an orthodox poem, like _Paradise Lost_, by John Milton,
wherein I proposed to treat more at large of Original Sin, and the great
mystery of Redemption; at others, I fancied that a connect treatise on
the efficacy of Free Grace would be more taking; but although I made
divers beginnings in both subjects, some new thought ever came into my
head, and the whole summer passed away and nothing was done.  I therefore
postponed my design of writing a book till the winter, when I would have
the benefit of the long nights.  Before that, however, I had other things
of more importance to think about.  My servant lasses, having no eye of a
mistress over them, wastered every thing at such a rate, and made such a
galravitching in the house, that, long before the end of the year, the
year’s stipend was all spent, and I did not know what to do.  At lang and
length I mustered courage to send for Mr. Auld, who was then living, and
an elder.  He was a douce and discreet man, fair and well-doing in the
world, and had a better handful of strong common sense than many even of
the heritors.  So I told him how I was situated, and conferred with him;
and he advised me, for my own sake, to look out for another wife as soon
as decency would allow, which he thought might very properly be after the
turn of the year, by which time the first Mrs. Balwhidder would be dead
more than twelve months; and when I mentioned my design to write a book,
he said, (and he was a man of good discretion), that the doing of the
book was a thing that would keep, but masterful servants were a growing
evil; so, upon his counselling, I resolved not to meddle with the book
till I was married again, but employ the interim, between then and the
turn of the year, in looking out for a prudent woman to be my second
wife, strictly intending, as I did perform, not to mint a word about my
choice, if I made one, till the whole twelve months and a day, from the
date of the first Mrs. Balwhidder’s interment, had run out.

                        [Picture: Sabbath Morning]

In this the hand of Providence was very visible, and lucky for me it was
that I had sent for Mr. Auld when I did send, as the very week following,
a sound began to spread in the parish, that one of my lassies had got
herself with bairn, which was an awful thing to think had happened in the
house of her master, and that master a minister of the gospel.  Some
there were, for backbiting appertaineth to all conditions, that jealoused
and wondered if I had not a finger in the pie; which, when Mr. Auld
heard, he bestirred himself in such a manful and godly way in my defence,
as silenced the clash, telling that I was utterly incapable of any such
thing, being a man of a guileless heart, and a spiritual simplicity, that
would be ornamental in a child.  We then had the latheron summoned before
the session, and was not long of making her confess that the father was
Nichol Snipe, Lord Glencairn’s gamekeeper; and both her and Nichol were
obligated to stand in the kirk: but Nichol was a graceless reprobate, for
he came with two coats, one buttoned behind him, and another buttoned
before him, and two wigs of my lord’s, lent him by the valet-de-chamer;
the one over his face, and the other in the right way; and he stood with
his face to the church-wall.  When I saw him from the poopit, I said to
him—“Nichol, you must turn your face towards me!”  At the which, he
turned round to be sure, but there he presented the same show as his
back.  I was confounded, and did not know what to say, but cried out with
a voice of anger—“Nichol, Nichol! if ye had been a’ back, ye wouldna hae
been there this day;” which had such an effect on the whole congregation,
that the poor fellow suffered afterwards more derision, than if I had
rebuked him in the manner prescribed by the session.

This affair, with the previous advice of Mr. Auld, was, however, a
warning to me, that no pastor of his parish should be long without a
helpmate.  Accordingly, as soon as the year was out, I set myself
earnestly about the search for one; but as the particulars fall properly
within the scope and chronicle of the next year, I must reserve them for
it; and I do not recollect that any thing more particular befell in this,
excepting that William Mutchkins, the father of Mr. Mutchkins, the great
spirit-dealer in Glasgow, set up a change-house in the clachan, which was
the first in the parish, and which, if I could have helped, would have
been the last; for it was opening a howf to all manner of wickedness, and
was an immediate get and offspring of the smuggling trade, against which
I had so set my countenance.  But William Mutchkins himself was a
respectable man, and no house could be better ordered than his change.
At a stated hour he made family worship, for he brought up his children
in the fear of God and the Christian religion; and although the house was
full, he would go in to the customers, and ask them if they would want
anything for half an hour, for that he was going to make exercise with
his family; and many a wayfaring traveller has joined in the prayer.
There is no such thing, I fear, nowadays, of publicans entertaining
travellers in this manner.




CHAPTER VI
YEAR 1765


AS there was little in the last year that concerned the parish, but only
myself, so in this the like fortune continued; and saving a rise in the
price of barley, occasioned, as was thought, by the establishment of a
house for brewing whisky in a neighbouring parish, it could not be said
that my people were exposed to the mutations and influences of the stars,
which ruled in the seasons of Ann. Dom. 1765.  In the winter there was a
dearth of fuel, such as has not been since; for when the spring loosened
the bonds of the ice, three new coal-heughs were shanked in the Douray
moor, and ever since there has been a great plenty of that necessary
article.  Truly, it is very wonderful to see how things come round.  When
the talk was about the shanking of their heughs, and a paper to get folk
to take shares in them, was carried through the circumjacent parishes, it
was thought a gowk’s errand; but no sooner was the coal reached, but up
sprung such a traffic, that it was a godsend to the parish, and the
opening of a trade and commerce, that has, to use an old byword, brought
gold in gowpins amang us.  From that time my stipend has been on the
regular increase, and therefore I think that the incoming of the heritors
must have been in like manner augmented.

Soon after this, the time was drawing near for my second marriage.  I had
placed my affections, with due consideration, on Miss Lizy Kibbock, the
well brought-up daughter of Mr. Joseph Kibbock of the Gorbyholm, who was
the first that made a speculation in the farming way in Ayrshire, and
whose cheese were of such an excellent quality, that they have, under the
name of Delap-cheese, spread far and wide over the civilized world.  Miss
Lizy and me were married on the 29th day of April, with some
inconvenience to both sides, on account of the dread that we had of being
married in May; for it is said—

    “Of the marriages in May,
    The bairns die of a decay.”

However, married we were, and we hired the Irville chaise, and with Miss
Jenny her sister, and Becky Cairns her niece, who sat on a portmanty at
our feet, we went on a pleasure jaunt to Glasgow, where we bought a
miracle of useful things for the manse, that neither the first Mrs.
Balwhidder nor me ever thought of; but the second Mrs. Balwhidder that
was, had a geni for management, and it was extraordinary what she could
go through.  Well may I speak of her with commendations; for she was the
bee that made my honey, although at first things did not go so clear with
us.  For she found the manse rookit and herrit, and there was such a
supply of plenishing of all sort wanted, that I thought myself ruined and
undone by her care and industry.  There was such a buying of wool to make
blankets, with a booming of the meikle wheel to spin the same, and such
birring of the little wheel for sheets and napery, that the manse was for
many a day like an organ kist.  Then we had milk cows, and the calves to
bring up, and a kirning of butter, and a making of cheese; in short, I
was almost by myself with the jangle and din, which prevented me from
writing a book as I had proposed, and I for a time thought of the
peaceful and kindly nature of the first Mrs. Balwhidder with a sigh; but
the outcoming was soon manifest.  The second Mrs. Balwhidder sent her
butter on the market-days to Irville, and her cheese from time to time to
Glasgow, to Mrs. Firlot, that kept the huxtry in the Saltmarket; and they
were both so well made, that our dairy was just a coining of money,
insomuch that, after the first year, we had the whole tot of my stipend
to put untouched into the bank.

But I must say, that although we were thus making siller like sclate
stones, I was not satisfied in my own mind that I had got the manse
merely to be a factory of butter and cheese, and to breed up veal calves
for the slaughter; so I spoke to the second Mrs. Balwhidder, and pointed
out to her what I thought the error of our way; but she had been so
ingrained with the profitable management of cows and grumphies in her
father’s house, that she could not desist, at the which I was greatly
grieved.  By-and-by, however, I began to discern that there was something
as good in her example, as the giving of alms to the poor folk; for all
the wives of the parish were stirred up by it into a wonderful thrift,
and nothing was heard of in every house, but of quiltings and wabs to
weave; insomuch that, before many years came round, there was not a
better stocked parish, with blankets and napery, than mine was, within
the bounds of Scotland.

It was about the Michaelmas of this year that Mrs. Malcolm opened her
shop, which she did chiefly on the advice of Mrs. Balwhidder, who said it
was far better to allow a little profit on the different haberdasheries
that might be wanted, than to send to the neighbouring towns an end’s
errand on purpose for them, none of the lasses that were so sent ever
thinking of making less than a day’s play on every such occasion.  In a
word, it is not to be told how the second Mrs. Balwhidder, my wife,
showed the value of flying time, even to the concerns of this world, and
was the mean of giving a life and energy to the housewifery of the
parish, that has made many a one beek his shins in comfort, that would
otherwise have had but a cold coal to blow at.  Indeed, Mr. Kibbock, her
father, was a man beyond the common, and had an insight of things, by
which he was enabled to draw profit and advantage, where others could
only see risk and detriment.  He planted mounts of fir-trees on the bleak
and barren tops of the hills of his farm, the which everybody, and I
among the rest, considered as a thrashing of the water and raising of
bells.  But as his rack ran his trees grew, and the plantations supplied
him with stabs to make _stake and rice_ between his fields, which soon
gave them a trig and orderly appearance, such as had never before been
seen in the west country; and his example has, in this matter, been so
followed, that I have heard travellers say, who have been in foreign
countries, that the shire of Ayr, for its bonny round green plantings on
the tops of the hills, is above comparison either with Italy or
Switzerland, where the hills are, as it were, in a state of nature.

Upon the whole, this was a busy year in the parish, and the seeds of many
great improvements were laid.  The king’s road, the which then ran
through the Vennel, was mended; but it was not till some years after, as
I shall record by-and-by, that the trust-road, as it was called, was
made, the which had the effect of turning the town inside out.

Before I conclude, it is proper to mention that the kirk-bell, which had
to this time, from time immemorial, hung on an ash-tree, was one stormy
night cast down by the breaking of the branch, which was the cause of the
heritors agreeing to build the steeple.  The clock was a mortification to
the parish from the Lady Breadland, when she died some years after.




CHAPTER VII
YEAR 1766


IT was in this Ann. Dom. that the great calamity happened, the which took
place on a Sabbath evening in the month of February.  Mrs. Balwhidder had
just infused or masket the tea, and we were set round the fireside, to
spend the night in an orderly and religious manner, along with Mr. and
Mrs. Petticrew, who were on a friendly visitation to the manse, the
mistress being full cousin to Mrs. Balwhidder.—Sitting, as I was saying,
at our tea, one of the servant lasses came into the room with a sort of a
panic laugh, and said, “What are ye all doing there when the Breadland’s
in a low?”—“The Breadland in a low!” cried I.—“Oh, ay!” cried she;
“bleezing at the windows and the rigging, and out at the lum, like a
killogie.”  Upon the which, we all went to the door, and there, to be
sure, we did see that the Breadland was burning, the flames crackling
high out o’er the trees, and the sparks flying like a comet’s tail in the
firmament.

Seeing this sight, I said to Mr. Petticrew, that, in the strength of the
Lord, I would go and see what could be done, for it was as plain as the
sun in the heavens that the ancient place of the Breadlands would be
destroyed; whereupon he accorded to go with me, and we walked at a lively
course to the spot, and the people from all quarters were pouring in, and
it was an awsome scene.  But the burning of the house, and the droves of
the multitude, were nothing to what we saw when we got forenent the
place.  There was the rafters crackling, the flames raging, the servants
running, some with bedding, some with looking-glasses, and others with
chamber utensils as little likely to be fuel to the fire, but all
testifications to the confusion and alarm.  Then there was a shout,
“Whar’s Miss Girzie? whar’s the Major?”  The Major, poor man, soon cast
up, lying upon a feather-bed, ill with his complaints, in the garden; but
Lady Skimmilk was nowhere to be found.  At last, a figure was seen in the
upper flat, pursued by the flames, and that was Miss Girzie.  Oh! it was
a terrible sight to look at her in that jeopardy at the window, with her
gold watch in the one hand and the silver teapot in the other, skreighing
like desperation for a ladder and help.  But, before a ladder or help
could be found, the floor sunk down, and the roof fell in, and poor Miss
Girzie, with her idols, perished in the burning.  It was a dreadful
business!  I think, to this hour, how I saw her at the window, how the
fire came in behind her, and claught her like a fiery Belzebub, and bore
her into perdition before our eyes.  The next morning the atomy of the
body was found among the rubbish, with a piece of metal in what had been
each of its hands, no doubt the gold watch and the silver teapot.  Such
was the end of Miss Girzie; and the Breadland, which the young laird, my
pupil that was, by growing a resident at Edinburgh, never rebuilt.  It
was burnt to the very ground; nothing was spared but what the servants in
the first flaught gathered up in a hurry and ran with; but no one could
tell how the Major, who was then, as it was thought by the faculty, past
the power of nature to recover, got out of the house, and was laid on the
feather-bed in the garden.  However, he never got the better of that
night, and before Whitsunday he was dead too, and buried beside his
sister’s bones at the south side of the kirkyard dyke, where his cousin’s
son, that was his heir, erected the handsome monument, with the three
urns and weeping cherubims, bearing witness to the great valour of the
Major among the Hindoos, as well as other commendable virtues, for which,
as the epitaph says, he was universally esteemed and beloved, by all who
knew him, in his public and private capacity.

But although the burning of the Breadland-House was justly called the
great calamity, on account of what happened to Miss Girzie with her gold
watch and silver teapot; yet, as Providence never fails to bring good out
of evil, it turned out a catastrophe that proved advantageous to the
parish; for the laird, instead of thinking to build it up, was advised to
let the policy out as a farm, and the tack was taken by Mr. Coulter, than
whom there had been no such man in the agriculturing line among us
before, not even excepting Mr. Kibbock of the Gorbyholm, my father-in-law
that was.  Of the stabling, Mr. Coulter made a comfortable
dwelling-house; and having rugget out the evergreens and other
unprofitable plants, saving the twa ancient yew-trees which the
near-begaun Major and his sister had left to go to ruin about the
mansion-house, he turned all to production, and it was wonderful what an
increase he made the land bring forth.  He was from far beyond Edinburgh,
and had got his insight among the Lothian farmers, so that he knew what
crop should follow another, and nothing could surpass the regularity of
his rigs and furrows.—Well do I remember the admiration that I had, when,
in a fine sunny morning of the first spring after he took the Breadland,
I saw his braird on what had been the cows’ grass, as even and pretty as
if it had been worked and stripped in the loom with a shuttle.  Truly,
when I look back at the example he set, and when I think on the method
and dexterity of his management, I must say, that his coming to the
parish was a great godsend, and tended to do far more for the benefit of
my people, than if the young laird had rebuilded the Breadland-House in a
fashionable style, as was at one time spoken of.

But the year of the great calamity was memorable for another thing:—in
the December foregoing, the wind blew, as I have recorded in the
chronicle of the last year, and broke down the bough of the tree whereon
the kirk-bell had hung from the time, as was supposed, of the
persecution, before the bringing over of King William.  Mr. Kibbock, my
father-in-law then that was, being a man of a discerning spirit, when he
heard of the unfortunate fall of the bell, advised me to get the heritors
to big a steeple; but which, when I thought of the expense, I was afraid
to do.  He, however, having a great skill in the heart of man, gave me no
rest on the subject; but told me, that if I allowed the time to go by
till the heritors were used to come to the kirk without a bell, I would
get no steeple at all.  I often wondered what made Mr. Kibbock so fond of
a steeple, which is a thing that I never could see a good reason for,
saving that it is an ecclesiastical adjunct, like the gown and bands.
However, he set me on to get a steeple proposed, and after no little
argol-bargling with the heritors, it was agreed to.  This was chiefly
owing to the instrumentality of Lady Moneyplack, who, in that winter, was
much subjected to the rheumatics, she having, one cold and raw Sunday
morning, there being no bell to announce the time, come half an hour too
soon to the kirk, made her bestir herself to get an interest awakened
among the heritors in behalf of a steeple.

But when the steeple was built, a new contention arose.  It was thought
that the bell, which had been used in the ash-tree, would not do in a
stone and lime fabric; so, after great agitation among the heritors, it
was resolved to sell the old bell to a foundery in Glasgow, and buy a new
bell suitable to the steeple, which was a very comely fabric.  The buying
of the new bell led to other considerations, and the old Lady Breadland,
being at the time in a decaying condition, and making her will, she left
a mortification to the parish, as I have intimated, to get a clock; so
that, by the time the steeple was finished, and the bell put up, the Lady
Breadland’s legacy came to be implemented, according to the ordination of
the testatrix.

Of the casualities that happened in this year, I should not forget to put
down, as a thing for remembrance, that an aged woman, one Nanse Birrel, a
distillator of herbs, and well skilled in the healing of sores, who had a
great repute among the quarriers and colliers—she having gone to the
physic well in the sandy hills to draw water, was found, with her feet
uppermost in the well, by some of the bairns of Mr. Lorimore’s school;
and there was a great debate whether Nanse had fallen in by accident head
foremost, or, in a temptation, thrown herself in that position, with her
feet sticking up to the evil one; for Nanse was a curious discontented
blear-eyed woman, and it was only with great ado that I could get the
people keepit from calling her a witchwife.

I should likewise place on record, that the first ass that had ever been
seen in this part of the country, came in the course of this year with a
gang of tinklers, that made horn-spoons and mended bellows.  Where they
came from never was well made out; but being a blackaviced crew, they
were generally thought to be Egyptians.  They tarried about a week among
us, living in tents, with their little ones squattling among the litter;
and one of the older men of them set and tempered to me two razors, that
were as good as nothing, but which he made better than when they were
new.

                       [Picture: The Old Ploughman]

Shortly after, but I am not quite sure whether it was in the end of this
year, or the beginning of the next, although I have a notion that it was
in this, there came over from Ireland a troop of wild Irish, seeking for
work as they said; but they made free quarters, for they herrit the
roosts of the clachan, and cutted the throat of a sow of ours, the
carcass of which they no doubt intended to steal; but something came over
them, and it was found lying at the back side of the manse, to the great
vexation of Mrs. Balwhidder; for she had set her mind on a clecking of
pigs, and only waited for the China boar, that had been brought down from
London by Lord Eaglesham, to mend the breed of pork—a profitable
commodity, that her father, Mr. Kibbock, cultivated for the Glasgow
market.  The destruction of our sow, under such circumstances, was
therefore held to be a great crime and cruelty, and it had the effect to
raise up such a spirit in the clachan, that the Irish were obligated to
decamp; and they set out for Glasgow, where one of them was afterwards
hanged for a fact, but the truth concerning how he did it, I either never
heard, or it has passed from my mind, like many other things I should
have carefully treasured.




CHAPTER VIII
YEAR 1767


ALL things in our parish were now beginning to shoot up into a great
prosperity.  The spirit of farming began to get the upper hand of the
spirit of smuggling, and the coal-heughs that had been opened in the
Douray, now brought a pour of money among us.  In the manse, the thrift
and frugality of the second Mrs. Balwhidder throve exceedingly, so that
we could save the whole stipend for the bank.

The king’s highway, as I have related in the foregoing, ran through the
Vennel, which was a narrow and a crooked street, with many big stones
here and there, and every now and then, both in the spring and the fall,
a gathering of middens for the fields; insomuch that the coal-carts from
the Douray moor were often reested in the middle of the causey, and on
more than one occasion some of them laired altogether in the middens, and
others of them broke down.  Great complaint was made by the carters anent
these difficulties, and there was, for many a day, a talk and sound of an
alteration and amendment; but nothing was fulfilled in the matter till
the month of March in this year, when the Lord Eaglesham was coming from
London to see the new lands that he had bought in our parish.  His
lordship was a man of a genteel spirit, and very fond of his horses,
which were the most beautiful creatures of their kind that had been seen
in all the country side.  Coming, as I was noting, to see his new lands,
he was obliged to pass through the clachan one day, when all the middens
were gathered out, reeking and sappy, in the middle of the causey.  Just
as his lordship was driving in with his prancing steeds, like a Jehu, at
one end of the vennel, a long string of loaded coal-carts came in at the
other, and there was hardly room for my lord to pass them.  What was to
be done?  His lordship could not turn back, and the coal-carts were in no
less perplexity.  Every body was out of doors to see and to help; when,
in trying to get his lordship’s carriage over the top of a midden, the
horses gave a sudden loup, and couped the coach, and threw my lord, head
foremost, into the very scent-bottle of the whole commodity, which made
him go perfect mad, and he swore like a trooper that he would get an act
of parliament to put down the nuisance—the which now ripened in the
course of this year into the undertaking of the trust-road.

His lordship, being in a woeful plight, left the carriage and came to the
manse, till his servant went to the castle for a change for him; but he
could not wait nor abide himself: so he got the lend of my best suit of
clothes, and was wonderful jocose both with Mrs. Balwhidder and me, for
he was a portly man, and I but a thin body, and it was really a droll
curiosity to see his lordship clad in my garments.

Out of this accident grew a sort of a neighbourliness between that Lord
Eaglesham and me; so that when Andrew Lanshaw, the brother that was of
the first Mrs. Balwhidder, came to think of going to India, I wrote to my
lord for his behoof, and his lordship got him sent out as a cadet, and
was extraordinary discreet to Andrew when he went up to London to take
his passage, speaking to him of me as if I had been a very saint, which
the Searcher of Hearts knows I am far from thinking myself.

But to return to the making of the trust-road, which, as I have said,
turned the town inside out.  It was agreed among the heritors, that it
should run along the back side of the south houses; and that there should
be steadings fued off on each side, according to a plan that was laid
down; and this being gone into, the town gradually, in the course of
years, grew up into that orderlyness which makes it now a pattern to the
country side—all which was mainly owing to the accident that befell the
Lord Eaglesham, which is a clear proof how improvements come about, as it
were, by the immediate instigation of Providence, which should make the
heart of man humble, and change his eyes of pride and haughtiness into a
lowly demeanour.

But although this making of the trust-road was surely a great thing for
the parish, and of an advantage to my people, we met, in this year, with
a loss not to be compensated—that was the death of Nanse Banks, the
schoolmistress.  She had been long in a weak and frail state; but being a
methodical creature, still kept on the school, laying the foundation for
many a worthy wife and mother.  However, about the decline of the year
her complaints increased, and she sent for me to consult about her giving
up the school; and I went to see her on Saturday afternoon, when the bit
lassies, her scholars, had put the house in order, and gone home till the
Monday.

She was sitting in the window-nook, reading THE WORD to herself, when I
entered; but she closed the book, and put her spectacles in for a mark
when she saw me; and, as it was expected I would come, her easy-chair,
with a clean cover, had been set out for me by the scholars, by which I
discerned that there was something more than common to happen, and so it
appeared when I had taken my seat.

“Sir,” said she, “I hae sent for you on a thing troubles me sairly.  I
have warsled with poortith in this shed, which it has pleased the Lord to
allow me to possess; but my strength is worn out, and I fear I maun yield
in the strife;” and she wiped her eye with her apron.  I told her,
however, to be of good cheer; and then she said, “That she could no
longer thole the din of the school, and that she was weary, and ready to
lay herself down to die whenever the Lord was pleased to permit.”  “But,”
continued she, “what can I do without the school; and, alas!  I can
neither work nor want; and I am wae to go on the session, for I am come
of a decent family.”  I comforted her, and told her, that I thought she
had done so much good in the parish, that the session was deep in her
debt, and that what they might give her was but a just payment for her
service.  “I would rather, however, sir,” said she, “try first what some
of my auld scholars will do, and it was for that I wanted to speak with
you.  If some of them would but just, from time to time, look in upon me,
that I may not die alane; and the little pick and drap that I require
would not be hard upon them—I am more sure that in this way their
gratitude would be no discredit, than I am of having any claim on the
session.”

As I had always a great respect for an honest pride, I assured her that I
would do what she wanted; and accordingly, the very morning after, being
Sabbath, I preached a sermon on the helplessness of them that have no
help of man, meaning aged single women, living in garret-rooms, whose
forlorn state, in the gloaming of life, I made manifest to the hearts and
understandings of the congregation, in such a manner that many shed
tears, and went away sorrowful.

Having thus roused the feelings of my people, I went round the houses on
the Monday morning, and mentioned what I had to say more particularly
about poor old Nanse Banks, the schoolmistress, and truly I was rejoiced
at the condition of the hearts of my people.  There was a universal
sympathy among them; and it was soon ordered that, what with one and
another, her decay should be provided for.  But it was not ordained that
she should be long heavy on their good-will.  On the Monday the school
was given up, and there was nothing but wailing among the bit lassies,
the scholars, for getting the vacance, as the poor things said, because
the mistress was going to lie down to dee.  And, indeed, so it came to
pass; for she took to her bed the same afternoon, and, in the course of
the week, dwindled away, and slipped out of this howling wilderness into
the kingdom of heaven, on the Sabbath following, as quietly as a blessed
saint could do.  And here I should mention, that the Lady Macadam, when I
told her of Nanse Banks’s case, enquired if she was a snuffer, and, being
answered by me that she was, her ladyship sent her a pretty French enamel
box full of macabaw, a fine snuff that she had in a bottle; and, among
the macabaw, was found a guinea, at the bottom of the box, after Nanse
Banks had departed this life, which was a kind thing of Lady Macadam to
do.

About the close of this year there was a great sough of old prophecies,
foretelling mutations and adversities, chiefly on account of the canal
that was spoken of to join the rivers of the Clyde and the Forth, it
being thought an impossible thing to be done; and the Adam and Eve
pear-tree, in our garden, budded out in an awful manner, and had divers
flourishes on it at Yule, which was thought an ominous thing, especially
as the second Mrs. Balwhidder was at the downlying with my eldest son
Gilbert, that is, the merchant in Glasgow; but nothing came o’t, and the
howdie said she had an easy time when the child came into the world,
which was on the very last day of the year, to the great satisfaction of
me, and of my people, who were wonderful lifted up because their minister
had a man-child born unto him.




CHAPTER IX
YEAR 1768


IT’S a surprising thing how time flieth away, carrying off our youth and
strength, and leaving us nothing but wrinkles and the ails of old age.
Gilbert, my son, that is now a corpulent man, and a Glasgow merchant,
when I take up my pen to record the memorables of this Ann. Dom., seems
to me yet but a suckling in swaddling clothes, mewing and peevish in the
arms of his mother, that has been long laid in the cold kirkyard, beside
her predecessor, in Abraham’s bosom.  It is not, however, my design to
speak much anent my own affairs, which would be a very improper and
uncomely thing, but only of what happened in the parish, this book being
for a witness and testimony of my ministry.  Therefore, setting out of
view both me and mine, I will now resuscitate the concerns of Mrs.
Malcolm and her children; for, as I think, never was there such a visible
preordination seen in the lives of any persons, as was seen in that of
this worthy decent woman, and her well-doing off-spring.  Her morning was
raw, and a sore blight fell upon her fortunes; but the sun looked out on
her midday, and her evening closed loun and warm; and the stars of the
firmament, that are the eyes of heaven, beamed as it were with gladness,
when she lay down to sleep the sleep of rest.

Her son Charles was by this time grown up into a stout buirdly lad, and
it was expected that, before the return of the Tobacco trader, he would
have been out of his time, and a man afore the mast, which was a great
step of preferment, as I heard say by persons skilled in seafaring
concerns.  But this was not ordered to happen; for, when the Tobacco
trader was lying in the harbour of Virginia in the North Americas, a
pressgang, that was in need of men for a man-of-war, came on board, and
pressed poor Charles, and sailed away with him on a cruise, nobody, for
many a day, could tell where, till I thought of the Lord Eaglesham’s
kindness.  His lordship having something to say with the king’s
government, I wrote to him, telling him who I was, and how jocose he had
been when buttoned in my clothes, that he might recollect me, thanking
him, at the same time, for his condescension and patronage to Andrew
Lanshaw, in his way to the East Indies.  I then slipped in, at the end of
the letter, a bit nota-bene concerning the case of Charles Malcolm,
begging his lordship, on account of the poor lad’s widow mother, to
enquire at the government if they could tell us any thing about Charles.
In the due course of time, I got a most civil reply from his lordship,
stating all about the name of the man-of-war, and where she was; and at
the conclusion his lordship said, that I was lucky in having the brother
of a Lord of the Admiralty on this occasion for my agent, as otherwise,
from the vagueness of my statement, the information might not have been
procured; which remark of his lordship was long a great riddle to me; for
I could not think what he meant about an agent, till, in the course of
the year, we heard that his own brother was concerned in the admiralty;
so that all his lordship meant was only to crack a joke with me, and that
he was ever ready and free to do, as shall be related in the sequel, for
he was an excellent man.

There being a vacancy for a schoolmistress, it was proposed to Mrs.
Malcolm, that, under her superintendence, her daughter Kate, that had
been learning great artifices in needle-work so long with Lady Macadam,
should take up the school, and the session undertook to make good to Kate
the sum of five pounds sterling per annum, over and above what the
scholars were to pay.  But Mrs. Malcolm said she had not strength herself
to warsle with so many unruly brats, and that Kate, though a fine lassie,
was a tempestuous spirit, and might lame some of the bairns in her
passion; and that selfsame night, Lady Macadam wrote me a very
complaining letter, for trying to wile away her companion; but her
ladyship was a canary-headed woman, and given to flights and tantrums,
having in her youth been a great toast among the quality.  It would,
however, have saved her from a sore heart, had she never thought of
keeping Kate Malcolm.  For this year her only son, who was learning the
art of war at an academy in France, came to pay her, his lady mother, a
visit.  He was a brisk and light-hearted stripling, and Kate Malcolm was
budding into a very rose of beauty; so between them a hankering began,
which, for a season, was productive of great heaviness of heart to the
poor old cripple lady; indeed, she assured me herself, that all her
rheumatics were nothing to the heart-ache which she suffered in the
progress of this business.  But that will be more treated of hereafter;
suffice it to say for the present, that we have thus recorded how the
plan for making Kate Malcolm our schoolmistress came to nought.  It
pleased, however, Him, from whom cometh every good and perfect gift, to
send at this time among us a Miss Sabrina Hooky, the daughter of old Mr.
Hooky, who had been schoolmaster in a neighbouring parish.  She had gone,
after his death, to live with an auntie in Glasgow, that kept a shop in
the Gallowgate.  It was thought that the old woman would have left her
heir to all her gatherings, and so she said she would, but alas! our life
is but within our lip.  Before her testament was made, she was carried
suddenly off by an apoplectick, an awful monument of the uncertainty of
time and the nearness of eternity, in her own shop, as she was in the
very act of weighing out an ounce of snuff to a professor of the College,
as Miss Sabrina herself told me.  Being thus destitute, it happened that
Miss Sabrina heard of the vacancy in our parish, as it were, just by the
cry of a passing bird, for she could not tell how; although I judge
myself that William Keckle the elder had a hand in it, as he was at the
time in Glasgow; and she wrote me a wonderful well-penned letter
bespeaking the situation, which letter came to hand on the morn following
Lady Macadam’s stramash to me about Kate Malcolm, and I laid it before
the session the same day; so that, by the time her auntie’s concern was
taken off her hands, she had a home and a howf among us to come in, to
the which she lived upwards of thirty years in credit and respect,
although some thought she had not the art of her predecessor, and was
more uppish in her carriage than befitted the decorum of her vocation.
Hers, however, was but a harmless vanity; and, poor woman, she needed all
manner of graces to set her out; for she was made up of odds and ends,
and had but one good eye, the other being blind, and just like a blue
bead.  At first she plainly set her cap for Mr. Lorimore, but after
oggling and goggling at him every Sunday in the kirk for a whole
half-year and more, Miss Sabrina desisted in despair.

But the most remarkable thing about her coming into the parish, was the
change that took place in Christian names among us.  Old Mr. Hooky, her
father, had, from the time he read his Virgil, maintained a sort of
intromission with the nine muses, by which he was led to baptize her
Sabrina, after a name mentioned by John Milton in one of his works.  Miss
Sabrina began by calling our Jennies Jessies, and our Nannies Nancies;
alas! I have lived to see even these likewise grow old-fashioned.  She
had also a taste in the mantua-making line, which she had learnt in
Glasgow; and I could date from the very Sabbath of her first appearance
in the kirk, a change growing in the garb of the younger lassies, who
from that day began to lay aside the silken plaidie over the head, the
which had been the pride and bravery of their grandmothers; and instead
of the snood, that was so snod and simple, they hided their heads in
round-eared bees-cap mutches, made of gauze and catgut, and other curious
contrivances of French millendery; all which brought a deal of custom to
Miss Sabrina, over and above the incomings and Candlemas offerings of
school; insomuch that she saved money, and in the course of three years
had ten pounds to put in the bank.

At the time, these alterations and revolutions in the parish were thought
a great advantage; but now when I look back upon them, as a traveller on
the hill over the road he has passed, I have my doubts.  For with wealth
come wants, like a troop of clamorous beggars at the heels of a generous
man; and it’s hard to tell wherein the benefit of improvement in a
country parish consists, especially to those who live by the sweat of
their brow.  But it is not for me to make reflections; my task and duty
is to note the changes of time and habitudes.




CHAPTER X
YEAR 1769


I HAVE my doubts whether it was in the beginning of this year, or in the
end of the last, that a very extraordinary thing came to light in the
parish; but, howsoever that may be, there is nothing more certain than
the fact, which it is my duty to record.  I have mentioned already how it
was that the toll, or trust-road, was set a-going, on account of the Lord
Eaglesham’s tumbling on the midden in the Vennel.  Well, it happened to
one of the labouring men, in breaking the stones to make metal for the
new road, that he broke a stone that was both large and remarkable, and
in the heart of it, which was boss, there was found a living creature,
that jumped out the moment it saw the light of heaven, to the great
terrification of the man, who could think it was nothing but an evil
spirit that had been imprisoned therein for a time.  The man came to me
like a demented creature, and the whole clachan gathered out, young and
old, and I went at their head to see what the miracle could be, for the
man said it was a fiery dragon, spewing smoke and flames.  But when we
came to the spot, it was just a yird toad, and the laddie weans nevelled
it to death with stones, before I could persuade them to give over.
Since then, I have read of such things coming to light in the _Scots
Magazine_, a very valuable book.

                       [Picture: The Elder’s Wife]

Soon after the affair of “the wee deil in the stane,” as it was called, a
sough reached us that the Americas were seized with the rebellious spirit
of the ten tribes, and were snapping their fingers in the face of the
king’s government.  The news came on a Saturday night, for we had no
newspapers in those days, and was brought by Robin Modiwort, that fetched
the letters from the Irville post.  Thomas Fullarton (he has been dead
many a day) kept the grocery shop at Irville, and he had been in at
Glasgow, as was his yearly custom, to settle his accounts, and to buy a
hogshead of tobacco, with sugar and other spiceries; and being in
Glasgow, Thomas was told by the merchant of a great rise in tobacco, that
had happened by reason of the contumacity of the plantations, and it was
thought that blood would be spilt before things were ended, for that the
King and Parliament were in a great passion with them.  But as Charles
Malcolm, in the king’s ship, was the only one belonging to the parish
that was likely to be art and part in the business, we were in a manner
little troubled at the time with this first gasp of the monster of war,
who, for our sins, was ordained to swallow up and devour so many of our
fellow-subjects, before he was bound again in the chains of mercy and
peace.

I had, in the meantime, written a letter to the Lord Eaglesham, to get
Charles Malcolm out of the clutches of the pressgang in the man-of-war;
and about a month after, his lordship sent me an answer, wherein was
enclosed a letter from the captain of the ship, saying, that Charles
Malcolm was so good a man that he was reluctant to part with him, and
that Charles himself was well contented to remain aboard.  Anent which,
his lordship said to me, that he had written back to the captain to make
a midshipman of Charles, and that he would take him under his own
protection, which was great joy on two accounts to us all, especially to
his mother; first, to hear that Charles was a good man, although in years
still but a youth; and, secondly, that my lord had, of his own free-will,
taken him under the wing of his patronage.

But the sweet of this world is never to be enjoyed without some of the
sour.  The coal bark between Irville and Belfast, in which Robert
Malcolm, the second son of his mother, was serving his time to be a
sailor, got a charter, as it was called, to go with to Norway for deals,
which grieved Mrs. Malcolm to the very heart; for there was then no short
cut by the canal, as now is, between the rivers of the Forth and Clyde,
but every ship was obligated to go far away round by the Orkneys, which,
although a voyage in the summer not overly dangerous, there being long
days and short nights then, yet in the winter it was far otherwise, many
vessels being frozen up in the Baltic till the spring; and there was a
story told at the time, of an Irville bark coming home in the dead of the
year, that lost her way altogether, and was supposed to have sailed north
into utter darkness, for she was never more heard of: and many an awful
thing was said of what the auld mariners about the shore thought
concerning the crew of that misfortunate vessel.  However, Mrs. Malcolm
was a woman of great faith, and having placed her reliance on Him who is
the orphan’s stay and widow’s trust, she resigned her bairn into his
hands, with a religious submission to his pleasure, though the mother’s
tear of weak human nature was on her cheek and in her e’e.  And her faith
was well rewarded, for the vessel brought him safe home, and he had seen
such a world of things, that it was just to read a story-book to hear him
tell of Elsineur and Gottenburg, and other fine and great places that we
had never heard of till that time; and he brought me a bottle of Riga
balsam, which for healing cuts was just miraculous, besides a clear
bottle of Rososolus for his mother, a spirit which for cordiality could
not be told; for though since that time we have had many a sort of
Dantzic cordial, I have never tasted any to compare with Robin Malcolm’s
Rososolus.  The Lady Macadam, who had a knowledge of such things,
declared it was the best of the best sort; for Mrs. Malcolm sent her
ladyship some of it in a doctor’s bottle, as well as to Mrs. Balwhidder,
who was then at the downlying with our daughter Janet—a woman now in the
married state, that makes a most excellent wife, having been brought up
with great pains, and well educated, as I shall have to record by-and-by.

About the Christmas of this year, Lady Macadam’s son having been
perfected in the art of war at a school in France, had, with the help of
his mother’s friends, and his father’s fame, got a stand of colours in
the Royal Scots regiment; he came to show himself in his regimentals to
his lady mother, like a dutiful son, as he certainly was.  It happened
that he was in the kirk in his scarlets and gold, on the same Sunday that
Robert Malcolm came home from the long voyage to Norway for deals; and I
thought when I saw the soldier and the sailor from the pulpit, that it
was an omen of war, among our harmless country folks, like swords and
cannon amidst ploughs and sickles, coming upon us; and I became laden in
spirit, and had a most weighty prayer upon the occasion, which was long
after remembered, many thinking, when the American war broke out, that I
had been gifted with a glimmering of prophecy on that day.

It was during this visit to his lady mother, that young Laird Macadam
settled the correspondence with Kate Malcolm, which, in the process of
time, caused us all so much trouble; for it was a clandestine concern:
but the time is not yet ripe for me to speak of it more at large.  I
should, however, mention, before concluding this annal, that Mrs. Malcolm
herself was this winter brought to death’s door by a terrible host that
came on her in the kirk, by taking a kittling in her throat.  It was a
terrification to hear her sometimes; but she got the better of it in the
spring, and was more herself thereafter than she had been for years
before; and her daughter Effie or Euphemia, as she was called by Miss
Sabrina, the schoolmistress, was growing up to be a gleg and clever
quean; she was, indeed, such a spirit in her way, that the folks called
her Spunkie; while her son William, that was the youngest of the five,
was making a wonderful proficiency with Mr. Lorimore.  He was indeed a
douce, well-doing laddie, of a composed nature; insomuch that the master
said he was surely chosen for the ministry.  In short, the more I think
on what befell this family, and of the great meekness and Christian worth
of the parent, I verily believe there never could have been in any parish
such a manifestation of the truth, that they who put their trust in the
Lord, are sure of having a friend that will never forsake them.




CHAPTER XI
YEAR 1770


THIS blessed Ann. Dom. was one of the Sabbaths of my ministry.  When I
look back upon it, all is quiet and good order: the darkest cloud of the
smuggling had passed over, at least from my people, and the rumours of
rebellion in America were but like the distant sound of the bars of Ayr.
We sat, as it were, in a lown and pleasant place, beholding our
prosperity, like the apple-tree adorned with her garlands of flourishes,
in the first fair mornings of the spring, when the birds were returning
thanks to their Maker for the coming again of the seed-time, and the busy
bee goeth forth from her cell, to gather honey from the flowers of the
field, and the broom of the hill, and the blue-bells and gowans, which
Nature, with a gracious and a gentle hand, scatters in the valley, as she
walketh forth in her beauty, to testify to the goodness of the Father of
all mercies.

Both at the spring and the harvest sacraments, the weather was as that
which is in Paradise; there was a glad composure in all hearts, and the
minds of men were softened towards each other.  The number of
communicants was greater than had been known for many years, and the
tables were filled by the pious from many a neighbouring parish: those of
my hearers who had opposed my placing, declared openly, for a testimony
of satisfaction and holy thankfulness, that the tent, so surrounded as it
was on both occasions, was a sight they never had expected to see.  I
was, to be sure, assisted by some of the best divines then in the land,
but I had not been a sluggard myself in the vineyard.

Often, when I think on this year, so fruitful in pleasant intimacies, has
the thought come into my mind, that as the Lord blesses the earth from
time to time with a harvest of more than the usual increase, so, in like
manner, he is sometimes for a season pleased to pour into the breasts of
mankind a larger portion of good-will and charity, disposing them to love
one another, to be kindly to all creatures, and filled with the delight
of thankfulness to himself, which is the greatest of blessings.

It was in this year that the Earl of Eaglesham ordered the fair to be
established in the village; and it was a day of wonderful festivity to
all the bairns, and lads and lassies, for miles round.  I think, indeed,
that there has never been such a fair as the first since; for although we
have more mountebanks and merry-andrews now, and richer cargoes of
groceries and packman’s stands, yet there has been a falling off in the
light-hearted daffing, while the hobleshows in the change-houses have
been awfully augmented.  It was on this occasion that Punch’s opera was
first seen in our country side, and surely never was there such a funny
curiosity; for although Mr. Punch himself was but a timber idol, he was
as droll as a true living thing, and napped with his head so comical; but
oh! he was a sorrowful contumacious captain, and it was just a sport to
see how he rampaged, and triumphed, and sang.  For months after, the
laddie weans did nothing but squeak and sing like Punch.  In short, a
blithe spirit was among us throughout this year, and the briefness of the
chronicle bears witness to the innocency of the time.




CHAPTER XII
YEAR 1771


IT was in this year that my troubles with Lady Macadam’s affair began.
She was a woman, as I have by hint here and there intimated, of a
prelatic disposition, seeking all things her own way, and not overly
scrupulous about the means, which I take to be the true humour of
prelacy.  She was come of a high episcopal race in the east country,
where sound doctrine had been long but little heard, and she considered
the comely humility of a presbyter as the wickedness of hypocrisy; so
that, saving in the way of neighbourly visitation, there was no sincere
communion between us.  Nevertheless, with all her vagaries, she had the
element of a kindly spirit, that would sometimes kythe in actions of
charity, that showed symptoms of a true Christian grace, had it been
properly cultivated; but her morals had been greatly neglected in her
youth, and she would waste her precious time in the long winter nights,
playing at the cards with her visitors; in the which thriftless and
sinful pastime, she was at great pains to instruct Kate Malcolm, which I
was grieved to understand.  What, however, I most misliked in her
ladyship, was a lightness and juvenility of behaviour altogether
unbecoming her years; for she was far past three-score, having been long
married without children.  Her son, the soldier officer, came so late,
that it was thought she would have been taken up as an evidence in the
Douglas cause.  She was, to be sure, crippled with the rheumatics, and no
doubt the time hung heavy on her hands; but the best friends of
recreation and sport must allow, that an old woman, sitting whole hours
jingling with that paralytic chattel a spinnet, was not a natural object!
What, then, could be said for her singing Italian songs, and getting all
the newest from Vauxhall in London, a boxful at a time, with new
novel-books, and trinkum-trankum flowers and feathers, and sweetmeats,
sent to her by a lady of the blood royal of Paris?  As for the music, she
was at great pains to instruct Kate, which, with the other things she
taught, were sufficient, as my lady said herself, to qualify poor Kate
for a duchess or a governess, in either of which capacities, her ladyship
assured Mrs. Malcolm, she would do honour to her instructor, meaning her
own self; but I must come to the point anent the affair.

One evening, early in the month of January, as I was sitting by myself in
my closet studying the _Scots Magazine_, which I well remember the new
number had come but that very night, Mrs. Balwhidder being at the time
busy with the lasses in the kitchen, and superintending, as her custom
was, for she was a clever woman, a great wool-spinning we then had, both
little wheel and meikle wheel, for stockings and blankets—sitting, as I
was saying, in the study, with the fire well gathered up, for a night’s
reflection, a prodigious knocking came to the door, by which the book was
almost startled out of my hand, and all the wheels in the house were
silenced at once.  This was her ladyship’s flunkey, to beg me to go to
her, whom he described as in a state of desperation.  Christianity
required that I should obey the summons; so, with what haste I could,
thinking that perhaps, as she had been low-spirited for some time about
the young laird’s going to the Indies, she might have got a cast of
grace, and been wakened in despair to the state of darkness in which she
had so long lived, I made as few steps of the road between the manse and
her house as it was in my ability to do.

On reaching the door, I found a great light in the house—candles burning
up stairs and down stairs, and a sough of something extraordinar going
on.  I went into the dining-room, where her ladyship was wont to sit; but
she was not there—only Kate Malcolm all alone, busily picking bits of
paper from the carpet.  When she looked up, I saw that her eyes were red
with weeping, and I was alarmed, and said, “Katy, my dear, I hope there
is no danger?”  Upon which the poor lassie rose, and, flinging herself in
a chair, covered her face with her hands, and wept bitterly.

“What is the old fool doing with the wench?” cried a sharp angry voice
from the drawing-room—“why does not he come to me?”  It was the voice of
Lady Macadam herself, and she meant me.  So I went to her; but, oh! she
was in a far different state from what I had hoped.  The pride of this
world had got the upper hand of her, and was playing dreadful antics with
understanding.  There was she, painted like a Jezebel, with gum-flowers
on her head, as was her custom every afternoon, sitting on a settee, for
she was lame, and in her hand she held a letter.  “Sir,” said she, as I
came into the room, “I want you to go instantly to that young fellow,
your clerk, (meaning Mr. Lorimore, the schoolmaster, who was likewise
session-clerk and precentor,) and tell him I will give him a couple of
hundred pounds to marry Miss Malcolm without delay, and undertake to
procure him a living from some of my friends.”

“Softly, my lady, you must first tell me the meaning of all this haste of
kindness,” said I, in my calm methodical manner.  At the which she began
to cry and sob, like a petted bairn, and to bewail her ruin, and the
dishonour of her family.  I was surprised, and beginning to be
confounded; at length out it came.  The flunkey had that night brought
two London letters from the Irville post, and Kate Malcolm being out of
the way when he came home, he took them both in to her ladyship on the
silver server, as was his custom; and her ladyship, not jealousing that
Kate could have a correspondence with London, thought both the letters
were for herself, for they were franked; so, as it happened, she opened
the one that was for Kate, and this, too, from the young laird, her own
son.  She could not believe her eyes when she saw the first words in his
hand of write; and she read, and she better read, till she read all the
letter, by which she came to know that Kate and her darling were trysted,
and that this was not the first love-letter which had passed between
them.  She, therefore, tore it in pieces, and sent for me, and screamed
for Kate; in short, went, as it were, off at the head, and was neither to
bind nor to hold on account of this intrigue, as she, in her wrath,
stigmatised the innocent gallanting of poor Kate and the young laird.

I listened in patience to all she had to say anent the discovery, and
offered her the very best advice; but she derided my judgment; and
because I would not speak outright to Mr. Lorimore, and get him to marry
Kate off hand, she bade me good-night with an air, and sent for him
herself.  He, however, was on the brink of marriage with his present
worthy helpmate, and declined her ladyship’s proposals, which angered her
still more.  But although there was surely a great lack of discretion in
all this, and her ladyship was entirely overcome with her passion, she
would not part with Kate, nor allow her to quit the house with me, but
made her sup with her as usual that night, calling her sometimes a
perfidious baggage, and at other times, forgetting her delirium, speaking
to her as kindly as ever.  At night, Kate as usual helped her ladyship
into her bed, (this she told me with tears in her eyes next morning;) and
when Lady Macadam, as was her wont, bent to kiss her for good-night, she
suddenly recollected “the intrigue,” and gave Kate such a slap on the
side of the head, as quite dislocated for a time the intellects of the
poor young lassie.  Next morning, Kate was solemnly advised never to
write again to the laird, while the lady wrote him a letter, which, she
said, would be as good as a birch to the breech of the boy.  Nothing,
therefore, for some time, indeed, throughout the year, came of the
matter; but her ladyship, when Mrs. Balwhidder soon after called on her,
said that I was a nose-of-wax, and that she never would speak to me
again, which surely was not a polite thing to say to Mrs. Balwhidder, my
second wife.

This stramash was the first time I had interposed in the family concerns
of my people; for it was against my nature to make or meddle with private
actions saving only such as in course of nature came before the session;
but I was not satisfied with the principles of Lady Macadam, and I began
to be weary about Kate Malcolm’s situation with her ladyship, whose ways
of thinking I saw were not to be depended on, especially in those things
wherein her pride and vanity were concerned.  But the time ran on—the
butterflies and the blossoms were succeeded by the leaves and the fruit,
and nothing of a particular nature farther molested the general
tranquillity of this year; about the end of which, there came on a sudden
frost, after a tack of wet weather.  The roads were just a sheet of ice,
like a frozen river; insomuch that the coal-carts could not work; and one
of our cows, (Mrs. Balwhidder said, after the accident, it was our best;
but it was not so much thought of before,) fell in coming from the glebe
to the byre, and broke its two hinder legs, which obligated us to kill
it, in order to put the beast out of pain.  As this happened after we had
salted our mart, it occasioned us to have a double crop of puddings, and
such a show of hams in the kitchen, as was a marvel to our visitors to
see.




CHAPTER XIII
YEAR 1772


ON New-Year’s night, this year, a thing happened, which, in its own
nature, was a trifle; but it turned out as a mustard-seed that grows into
a great tree.  One of the elders, who has long been dead and gone, came
to the manse about a fact that was found out in the clachan, and after we
had discoursed on it some time, he rose to take his departure.  I went
with him to the door with the candle in my hand—it was a clear frosty
night, with a sharp wind; and the moment I opened the door, the blast
blew out the candle, so that I heedlessly, with the candlestick in my
hand, walked with him to the yett without my hat, by which I took a sore
cold in my head, that brought on a dreadful toothache; insomuch, that I
was obligated to go into Irville to get the tooth drawn, and this caused
my face to swell to such a fright, that, on the Sabbath-day, I could not
preach to my people.  There was, however, at that time, a young man, one
Mr. Heckletext, tutor in Sir Hugh Montgomerie’s family, and who had
shortly before been licensed.  Finding that I would not be able to preach
myself, I sent to him, and begged he would officiate for me, which he
very pleasantly consented to do, being, like all the young clergy,
thirsting to show his light to the world.  ’Twixt the fore and
afternoon’s worship, he took his check of dinner at the manse, and I
could not but say that he seemed both discreet and sincere.  Judge,
however, what was brewing, when the same night Mr. Lorimore came and told
me, that Mr. Heckletext was the suspected person anent the fact that had
been instrumental, in the hand of a chastising Providence, to afflict me
with the toothache, in order, as it afterwards came to pass, to bring the
hidden hypocrisy of the ungodly preacher to light.  It seems that the
donsie lassie who was in fault, had gone to the kirk in the afternoon,
and seeing who was in the pulpit, where she expected to see me, was
seized with the hysterics, and taken with her crying on the spot, the
which being untimely, proved the death of both mother and bairn, before
the thing was properly laid to the father’s charge.

                         [Picture: The Precentor]

This caused a great uproar in the parish.  I was sorely blamed to let
such a man as Mr. Heckletext go up into my pulpit, although I was as
ignorant of his offences as the innocent child that perished; and, in an
unguarded hour, to pacify some of the elders, who were just distracted
about the disgrace, I consented to have him called before the session.
He obeyed the call, and in a manner that I will never forget; for he was
a sorrow of sin and audacity, and demanded to know why, and for what
reason, he was summoned.  I told him the whole affair in my calm and
moderate way; but it was oil cast upon a burning coal.  He flamed up in a
terrible passion; threepit at the elders that they had no proof whatever
of his having had any trafficking in the business, which was the case;
for it was only a notion, the poor deceased lassie never having made a
disclosure: called them libellous conspirators against his character,
which was his only fortune, and concluded by threatening to punish them,
though he exempted me from the injury which their slanderous insinuations
had done to his prospects in life.  We were all terrified, and allowed
him to go away without uttering a word; and sure enough he did bring a
plea in the courts of Edinburgh against Mr. Lorimore and the elders for
damages, laid at a great sum.

What might have been the consequence, no one can tell; but soon after he
married Sir Hugh’s house-keeper, and went with her into Edinburgh, where
he took up a school; and, before the trial came on, that is to say,
within three months of the day that I myself married them, Mrs.
Heckletext was delivered of a thriving lad bairn, which would have been a
witness for the elders, had the worst come to the worst.  This was,
indeed, we all thought, a joyous deliverance to the parish, and it was a
lesson to me never to allow any preacher to mount my pulpit, unless I
knew something of his moral character.

In other respects, this year passed very peaceably in the parish: there
was a visible increase of worldly circumstances, and the hedges which had
been planted along the toll-road, began to put forth their branches, and
to give new notions of orderlyness and beauty to the farmers.  Mrs.
Malcolm heard from time to time from her son Charles, on board the
man-of-war the _Avenger_, where he was midshipman; and he had found a
friend in the captain, that was just a father to him.  Her second son,
Robert, being out of his time at Irville, went to the Clyde to look for a
berth, and was hired to go to Jamaica, in a ship called the _Trooper_.
He was a lad of greater sobriety of nature than Charles; douce, honest,
and faithful; and when he came home, though he brought no limes to me to
make punch, like his brother, he brought a Muscovy duck to Lady Macadam,
who had, as I have related, in a manner educated his sister Kate.  That
duck was the first of the kind we had ever seen, and many thought it was
of the goose species, only with short bowly legs.  It was, however, a
tractable and homely beast; and after some confabulation, as my lady
herself told Mrs. Balwhidder, it was received into fellowship by her
other ducks and poultry.  It is not, however, so much on account of the
rarity of the creature, that I have introduced it here, as for the
purpose of relating a wonderful operation that was performed on it by
Miss Sabrina, the schoolmistress.

There happened to be a sack of beans in our stable, and Lady Macadam’s
hens and fowls, which were not overly fed at home through the inattention
of her servants, being great stravaigers for their meat, in passing the
door went in to pick, and the Muscovy, seeing a hole in the bean-sack,
dabbled out a crapful before she was disturbed.  The beans swelled on the
poor bird’s stomach, and her crap bellied out like the kyte of a Glasgow
magistrate, until it was just a sight to be seen with its head back on
its shoulders.  The bairns of the clachan followed it up and down,
crying, the lady’s muckle jock’s aye growing bigger, till every heart was
wae for the creature.  Some thought it was afflicted with a tympathy, and
others, that it was the natural way for such-like ducks to cleck their
young.  In short, we were all concerned; and my lady, having a great
opinion of Miss Sabrina’s skill, had a consultation with her on the case,
at which Miss Sabrina advised, that what she called the Cæsarean
operation should be tried, which she herself performed accordingly, by
opening the creature’s crap, and taking out as many beans as filled a
mutchkin stoup, after which she sewed it up, and the Muscovy went its way
to the water-side, and began to swim, and was as jocund as ever;
insomuch, that in three days after it was quite cured of all the
consequences of its surfeit.

I had at one time a notion to send an account of this to the _Scots
Magazine_, but something always came in the way to prevent me; so that it
has been reserved for a place in this chronicle, being, after Mr.
Heckletext’s affair, the most memorable thing in our history of this
year.




CHAPTER XIV
YEAR 1773


IN this Ann. Dom. there was something like a plea getting to a head,
between the session and some of the heritors, about a new school-house;
the thatch having been torn from the rigging of the old one by a blast of
wind, on the first Monday of February, by which a great snow storm got
admission, and the school was rendered utterly uninhabitable.  The
smaller sort of lairds were very willing to come into the plan with an
extra contribution, because they respected the master, and their bairns
were at the school; but the gentlemen, who had tutors in their own
houses, were not so manageable; and some of them even went so far as to
say, that the kirk, being only wanted on Sunday, would do very well for a
school all the rest of the week, which was a very profane way of
speaking; and I was resolved to set myself against any such thing, and to
labour, according to the power and efficacy of my station, to get a new
school built.

Many a meeting the session had on the subject; and the heritors debated,
and discussed, and revised their proceedings, and still no money for the
needful work was forthcoming.  Whereupon it happened one morning, as I
was rummaging in my scrutoire, that I laid my hand on the Lord
Eaglesham’s letter anent Charles Malcolm; and it was put into my head at
that moment, that if I was to write to his lordship, who was the greatest
heritor, and owned now the major part of the parish, that by his help and
influence I might be an instrument to the building of a comfortable new
school.  Accordingly, I sat down and wrote my lord all about the
accident, and the state of the school-house, and the divisions and
seditions among the heritors, and sent the letter to him at London by the
post the same day, without saying a word to any living soul on the
subject.

This in me was an advised thought; for, by the return of post, his
lordship with his own hand, in a most kind manner, authorized me to say
that he would build a new school at his own cost, and bade me go over and
consult about it with his steward at the castle, to whom he had written
by the same post the necessary instructions.  Nothing could exceed the
gladness which the news gave to the whole parish, and none said more in
behalf of his lordship’s bounty and liberality than the heritors;
especially those gentry who grudged the undertaking, when it was thought
that it would have to come out of their own pock-nook.

In the course of the summer, just as the roof was closing in of the
school-house, my lord came to the castle with a great company, and was
not there a day till he sent for me to come over, on the next Sunday, to
dine with him; but I sent him word that I could not do so, for it would
be a transgression of the Sabbath, which made him send his own gentleman,
to make his apology for having taken so great a liberty with me, and to
beg me to come on the Monday, which I accordingly did, and nothing could
be better than the discretion with which I was used.  There was a vast
company of English ladies and gentlemen, and his lordship, in a most
jocose manner, told them all how he had fallen on the midden, and how I
had clad him in my clothes, and there was a wonder of laughing and
diversion; but the most particular thing in the company, was a large,
round-faced man, with a wig, that was a dignitary in some great
Episcopalian church in London, who was extraordinary condescending
towards me, drinking wine with me at the table, and saying weighty
sentences, in a fine style of language, about the becoming grace of
simplicity and innocence of heart, in the clergy of all denominations of
Christians, which I was pleased to hear; for really he had a proud red
countenance, and I could not have thought he was so mortified to humility
within, had I not heard with what sincerity he delivered himself, and
seen how much reverence and attention was paid to him by all present,
particularly by my lord’s chaplain, who was a pious and pleasant young
divine, though educated at Oxford for the Episcopalian persuasion.

One day, soon after, as I was sitting in my closet conning a sermon for
the next Sunday, I was surprised by a visit from the dean, as the
dignitary was called.  He had come, he said, to wait on me as rector of
the parish—for so, it seems, they call a pastor in England—and to say,
that, if it was agreeable, he would take a family dinner with us before
he left the castle.  I could make no objection to this kindness; but said
I hoped my lord would come with him, and that we would do our best to
entertain them with all suitable hospitality.  About an hour or so after
he had returned to the castle, one of the flunkeys brought a letter from
his lordship, to say, that not only he would come with the dean, but that
they would bring his other guests with them; and that, as they could only
drink London wine, the butler would send me a hamper in the morning,
assured, as he was pleased to say, that Mrs. Balwhidder would otherwise
provide good cheer.

This notification, however, was a great trouble to my wife, who was only
used to manufacture the produce of our glebe and yard to a profitable
purpose, and not used to the treatment of deans and lords, and other
persons of quality.  However, she was determined to stretch a point on
this occasion; and we had, as all present declared, a charming dinner;
for fortunately one of the sows had a litter of pigs a few days before,
and in addition to a goose, that is but a boss bird, we had a roasted pig
with an apple in its mouth, which was just a curiosity to see; and my
lord called it a tithe pig; but I told him it was one of Mrs.
Balwhidder’s own clecking, which saying of mine made no little sport when
expounded to the dean.

But, och how! this was the last happy summer that we had for many a year
in the parish; and an omen of the dule that ensued, was in a sacrilegious
theft that a daft woman, Jenny Gaffaw, and her idiot daughter, did in the
kirk, by tearing off and stealing the green serge lining of my lord’s
pew, to make, as they said, a hap for their shoulders in the cold
weather—saving, however, the sin, we paid no attention at the time to the
mischief and tribulation that so unheard-of a trespass boded to us all.
It took place about Yule, when the weather was cold and frosty, and poor
Jenny was not very able to go about seeking her meat as usual.  The deed,
however, was mainly done by her daughter, who, when brought before me,
said, “her poor mother’s back had mair need of claes than the
kirk-boards;” which was so true a thing, that I could not punish her, but
wrote anent it to my lord, who not only overlooked the offence, but sent
orders to the servants at the castle to be kind to the poor woman, and
the natural, her daughter.




CHAPTER XV
YEAR 1774


WHEN I look back on this year, and compare what happened therein with the
things that had gone before, I am grieved to the heart, and pressed down
with an afflicted spirit.  We had, as may be read, trials and
tribulations in the days that were past; and in the rank and boisterous
times of the smuggling there was much sin and blemish among us, but
nothing so dark and awful as what fell out in the course of this unhappy
year.  The evil omen of daft Jenny Gaffaw and her daughter’s sacrilege,
had soon a bloody verification.

About the beginning of the month of March in this year, the war in
America was kindling so fast that the government was obligated to send
soldiers over the sea, in the hope to quell the rebellious temper of the
plantations; and a party of a regiment that was quartered at Ayr was
ordered to march to Greenock, to be there shipped off.  The men were wild
and wicked profligates, without the fear of the Lord before their eyes;
and some of them had drawn up with light women in Ayr, who followed them
on their march.  This the soldiers did not like, not wishing to be
troubled with such gear in America; so the women, when they got the
length of Kilmarnock, were ordered to retreat and go home, which they all
did but one Jean Glaikit, who persisted in her intent to follow her joe,
Patrick O’Neil, a Catholic Irish corporal.  The man did, as he said, all
in his capacity to persuade her to return, but she was a contumacious
limmer, and would not listen to reason; so that, in passing along our
toll-road, from less to more, the miserable wretches fell out, and
fought, and the soldier put an end to her with a hasty knock on the head
with his firelock, and marched on after his comrades.

The body of the woman was, about half an hour after, found by the
scholars of Mr. Lorimore’s school, who had got the play to see the
marching, and to hear the drums of the soldiers.  Dreadful was the shout
and the cry throughout the parish at this foul work.  Some of the farmer
lads followed the soldiers on horseback, and others ran to Sir Hugh, who
was a justice of the peace, for his advice.—Such a day as that was!

However, the murderer was taken, and, with his arms tied behind him with
a cord, he was brought back to the parish, where he confessed before Sir
Hugh the deed, and how it happened.  He was then put in a cart, and,
being well guarded by six of the lads, was taken to Ayr jail.

It was not long after this that the murderer was brought to trial, and,
being found guilty on his own confession, he was sentenced to be
executed, and his body to be hung in chains near the spot where the deed
was done.  I thought that all in the parish would have run to desperation
with horror when the news of this came, and I wrote immediately to the
Lord Eaglesham to get this done away by the merciful power of the
government, which he did, to our great solace and relief.

In the autumn, the young Laird Macadam, being ordered with his regiment
for the Americas, got leave from the king to come and see his lady
mother, before his departure.  But it was not to see her only, as will
presently appear.

Knowing how much her ladyship was averse to the notion he had of Kate
Malcolm, he did not write of his coming, lest she would send Kate out of
the way, but came in upon them at a late hour, as they were wasting their
precious time, as was the nightly wont of my lady, with a pack of cards;
and so far was she from being pleased to see him, that no sooner did she
behold his face, but, like a tap of tow, she kindled upon both him and
Kate, and ordered them out of her sight and house.  The young folk had
discretion: Kate went home to her mother, and the laird came to the
manse, and begged us to take him in.  He then told me what had happened;
and that, having bought a captain’s commission, he was resolved to marry
Kate, and hoped I would perform the ceremony, if her mother would
consent.  “As for mine,” said he, “she will never agree; but, when the
thing is done, her pardon will not be difficult to get; for, with all her
whims and caprice, she is generous and affectionate.”  In short, he so
wiled and beguiled me, that I consented to marry them, if Mrs. Malcolm
was agreeable.  “I will not disobey my mother,” said he, “by asking her
consent, which I know she will refuse; and, therefore, the sooner it is
done the better.”  So we then stepped over to Mrs. Malcolm’s house, where
we found that saintly woman, with Kate and Effie, and Willie, sitting
peacefully at their fireside, preparing to read their Bibles for the
night.  When we went in, and when I saw Kate, that was so ladylike there,
with the decent humility of her parent’s dwelling, I could not but think
she was destined for a better station; and when I looked at the captain,
a handsome youth, I thought surely their marriage is made in heaven; and
so I said to Mrs. Malcolm, who after a time consented, and likewise
agreed that her daughter should go with the captain to America; for her
faith and trust in the goodness of Providence was great and boundless,
striving, as it were, to be even with its tender mercies.  Accordingly,
the captain’s man was sent to bid the chaise wait that had taken him to
the lady’s, and the marriage was sanctified by me before we left Mrs.
Malcolm’s.  No doubt, they ought to have been proclaimed three several
Sabbaths; but I satisfied the session, at our first meeting, on account
of the necessity of the case.  The young couple went in the chaise
travelling to Glasgow, authorising me to break the matter to Lady
Macadam, which was a sore task; but I was spared from the performance.
For her ladyship had come to herself, and thinking on her own rashness in
sending away Kate and the captain in the way she had done, she was like
one by herself.  All the servants were scattered out and abroad in quest
of the lovers; and some of them, seeing the chaise drive from Mrs.
Malcolm’s door with them in it, and me coming out, jealoused what had
been done, and told their mistress outright of the marriage, which was to
her like a clap of thunder; insomuch that she flung herself back in her
settee, and was beating and drumming with her heels on the floor, like a
madwoman in Bedlam, when I entered the room.  For some time she took no
notice of me, but continued her din; but, by-and-by, she began to turn
her eyes in fiery glances upon me, till I was terrified lest she would
fly at me with her claws in her fury.  At last she stopped all at once,
and in a calm voice, said, “But it cannot now be helped, where are the
vagabonds?”—“They are gone,” replied I.—“Gone?” cried she, “gone
where?”—“To America, I suppose,” was my answer; upon which she again
threw herself back in the settee, and began again to drum and beat with
her feet as before.  But not to dwell on small particularities, let it
suffice to say, that she sent her coachman on one of her coach horses,
which, being old and stiff, did not overtake the fugitives till they were
in their bed at Kilmarnock, where they stopped that night; but when they
came back to the lady’s in the morning, she was as cagey and meikle taken
up with them, as if they had gotten her full consent and privilege to
marry from the first.  Thus was the first of Mrs. Malcolm’s children well
and creditably settled.  I have only now to conclude with observing, that
my son Gilbert was seized with the smallpox about the beginning of
December, and was blinded by them for seventeen days; for the inoculation
was not in practice yet among us, saving only in the genteel families
that went into Edinburgh for the education of their children, where it
was performed by the faculty there.

                             [Picture: Kate]




CHAPTER XVI
YEAR 1775


THE regular course of nature is calm and orderly, and tempests and
troubles are but lapses from the accustomed sobriety with which
Providence works out the destined end of all things.  From Yule till
Pace-Monday there had been a gradual subsidence of our personal and
parochial tribulations, and the spring, though late, set in bright and
beautiful, and was accompanied with the spirit of contentment; so that,
excepting the great concern that we all began to take in the American
rebellion, especially on account of Charles Malcolm that was in the
man-of-war, and of Captain Macadam that had married Kate, we had
throughout the better half of the year but little molestation of any
sort.  I should, however, note the upshot of the marriage.

By some cause that I do not recollect, if I ever had it properly told,
the regiment wherein the captain had bought his commission was not sent
to the plantations, but only over to Ireland, by which the captain and
his lady were allowed to prolong their stay in the parish with his
mother; and he, coming of age while he was among us, in making a
settlement on his wife, bought the house at the Braehead, which was then
just built by Thomas Shivers the mason, and he gave that house, with a
judicious income, to Mrs. Malcolm, telling her that it was not becoming,
he having it in his power to do the contrary, that she should any longer
be dependent on her own industry.  For this the young man got a name like
a sweet odour in all the country side; but that whimsical and prelatic
lady his mother, just went out of all bounds, and played such pranks for
an old woman, as cannot be told.  To her daughter-in-law, however, she
was wonderful kind; and, in fitting her out for going with the captain to
Dublin, it was extraordinary to hear what a paraphernalia she provided
her with.  But who could have thought that in this kindness a sore trial
was brewing for me!

It happened that Miss Betty Wudrife, the daughter of an heritor, had been
on a visit to some of her friends in Edinburgh; and being in at
Edinburgh, she came out with a fine mantle, decked and adorned with many
a ribbon-knot, such as had never been seen in the parish.  The Lady
Macadam, hearing of this grand mantle, sent to beg Miss Betty to lend it
to her, to make a copy for young Mrs. Macadam.  But Miss Betty was so
vogie with her gay mantle, that she sent back word, it would be making it
o’er common; which so nettled the old courtly lady, that she vowed
revenge, and said the mantle would not be long seen on Miss Betty.
Nobody knew the meaning of her words; but she sent privately for Miss
Sabrina, the schoolmistress, who was aye proud of being invited to my
lady’s, where she went on the Sabbath night to drink tea, and read
Thomson’s _Seasons_ and Hervey’s _Meditations_ for her ladyship’s
recreation.  Between the two, a secret plot was laid against Miss Betty
and her Edinburgh mantle; and Miss Sabrina, in a very treacherous manner,
for the which I afterwards chided her severely, went to Miss Betty, and
got a sight of the mantle, and how it was made, and all about it, until
she was in a capacity to make another like it; by which my lady and her,
from old silk and satin negligées which her ladyship had worn at the
French court, made up two mantles of the selfsame fashion as Miss
Betty’s, and, if possible, more sumptuously garnished, but in a flagrant
fool way.  On the Sunday morning after, her ladyship sent for Jenny
Gaffaw, and her daft daughter Meg, and showed them the mantles, and said
she would give then half-a-crown if they would go with them to the kirk,
and take their place in the bench beside the elders, and, after worship,
walk home before Miss Betty Wudrife.  The two poor natural things were
just transported with the sight of such bravery, and needed no other
bribe; so, over their bits of ragged duds, they put on the pageantry, and
walked away to the kirk like peacocks, and took their place on the bench,
to the great diversion of the whole congregation.

I had no suspicion of this, and had prepared an affecting discourse about
the horrors of war, in which I touched, with a tender hand, on the
troubles that threatened families and kindred in America; but all the
time I was preaching, doing my best, and expatiating till the tears came
into my eyes, I could not divine what was the cause of the inattention of
my people.  But the two vain haverels were on the bench under me, and I
could not see them; where they sat, spreading their feathers and picking
their wings, stroking down and setting right their finery; with such an
air as no living soul could see and withstand; while every eye in the
kirk was now on them, and now at Miss Betty Wudrife, who was in a worse
situation than if she had been on the stool of repentance.

Greatly grieved with the little heed that was paid to my discourse, I
left the pulpit with a heavy heart; but when I came out into the
kirkyard, and saw the two antics linking like ladies, and aye keeping in
the way before Miss Betty, and looking back and around in their pride and
admiration, with high heads and a wonderful pomp, I was really overcome,
and could not keep my gravity, but laughed loud out among the graves, and
in the face of all my people; who, seeing how I was vanquished in that
unguarded moment by my enemy, made a universal and most unreverent breach
of all decorum, at which Miss Betty, who had been the cause of all, ran
into the first open door, and almost fainted away with mortification.

This affair was regarded by the elders as a sinful trespass on the
orderlyness that was needful in the Lord’s house; and they called on me
at the manse that night, and said it would be a guilty connivance if I
did not rebuke and admonish Lady Macadam of the evil of her way; for they
had questioned daft Jenny, and had got at the bottom of the whole plot
and mischief.  But I, who knew her ladyship’s light way, would fain have
had the elders to overlook it, rather than expose myself to her tantrums;
but they considered the thing as a great scandal, so I was obligated to
conform to their wishes.  I might, however, have as well stayed at home,
for her ladyship was in one of her jocose humours when I went to speak to
her on the subject; and it was so far from my power to make a proper
impression on her of the enormity that had been committed, that she made
me laugh, in spite of my reason, at the fantastical drollery of her
malicious prank on Miss Betty Wudrife.

It, however, did not end here; for the session, knowing that it was
profitless to speak to the daft mother and daughter, who had been the
instruments, gave orders to Willy Howking, the betheral, not to let them
again so far into the kirk; and Willy, having scarcely more sense than
them both, thought proper to keep them out next Sunday altogether.  The
twa said nothing at the time, but the adversary was busy with them; for,
on the Wednesday following, there being a meeting of the synod at Ayr, to
my utter amazement the mother and daughter made their appearance there in
all their finery, and raised a complaint against me and the session, for
debarring them from church privileges.  No stage play could have produced
such an effect.  I was perfectly dumfoundered; and every member of the
synod might have been tied with a straw, they were so overcome with this
new device of that endless woman, when bent on provocation—the Lady
Macadam; in whom the saying was verified, that old folk are twice bairns;
for in such plays, pranks, and projects, she was as playrife as a very
lassie at her sampler; and this is but a swatch to what lengths she would
go.  The complaint was dismissed, by which the session and me were
assoilzied; but I’ll never forget till the day of my death what I
suffered on that occasion, to be so put to the wall by two born idiots.




CHAPTER XVII
YEAR 1776


IT belongs to the chroniclers of the realm to describe the damage and
detriment which fell on the power and prosperity of the kingdom, by
reason of the rebellion, that was fired into open war, against the name
and authority of the king in the plantations of America; for my task is
to describe what happened within the narrow bound of the pasturage of the
Lord’s flock, of which, in his bounty and mercy, he made me the humble,
willing, but alas! the weak and ineffectual shepherd.

About the month of February, a recruiting party came to our neighbour
town of Irville, to beat up for men to be soldiers against the rebels;
and thus the battle was brought, as it were, to our gates; for the very
first man that took on with them was one Thomas Wilson, a cottar in our
clachan, who, up to that time, had been a decent and creditable
character.  He was at first a farmer lad, but had forgathered with a
doited tawpy, whom he married, and had offspring three or four.  For some
time it was noticed that he had a down and thoughtful look, that his
cleeding was growing bare, and that his wife kept an untrig house, which,
it was feared by many, was the cause of Thomas going o’er often to the
change-house; he was, in short, during the greater part of the winter,
evidently a man foregone in the pleasures of this world, which made all
that knew him compassionate his situation.

No doubt, it was his household ills that burdened him past bearing, and
made him go into Irville, when he heard of the recruiting, and take on to
be a soldier.  Such a wally-wallying as the news of this caused at every
door; for the red-coats—from the persecuting days, when the black-cuffs
rampaged through the country—soldiers that fought for hire were held in
dread and as a horror among us, and terrible were the stories that were
told of their cruelty and sinfulness; indeed, there had not been wanting
in our time a sample of what they were, as witness the murder of Jean
Glaikit by Patrick O’Neil, the Irish corporal, anent which I have treated
at large in the memorables of the year 1774.

A meeting of the session was forthwith held; for here was Thomas Wilson’s
wife and all his weans, an awful cess, thrown upon the parish; and it was
settled outright among us, that Mr. Docken, who was then an elder, but is
since dead, a worthy man, with a soft tongue and a pleasing manner,
should go to Irville, and get Thomas, if possible, released from the
recruiters.  But it was all in vain; the sergeant would not listen to
him, for Thomas was a strapping lad; nor would the poor infatuated man
himself agree to go back, but cursed like a cadger, and swore that, if he
stayed any longer among his plagues, he would commit some rash act; so we
were saddled with his family, which was the first taste and preeing of
what war is when it comes into our hearths, and among the breadwinners.

The evil, however, did not stop here.  Thomas, when he was dressed out in
the king’s clothes, came over to see his bairns, and take a farewell of
his friends, and he looked so gallant, that the very next market-day
another lad of the parish listed with him; but he was a ramplor, roving
sort of a creature, and, upon the whole, it was thought he did well for
the parish when he went to serve the king.

The listing was a catching distemper.  Before the summer was over, the
other three of the farming lads went off with the drum, and there was a
wailing in the parish, which made me preach a touching discourse.  I
likened the parish to a widow woman with a small family, sitting in her
cottage by the fireside, herself spinning with an eident wheel, ettling
her best to get them a bit and a brat, and the poor weans all canty about
the hearthstane—the little ones at their playocks, and the elder at their
tasks—the callans working with hooks and lines to catch them a meal of
fish in the morning—and the lassies working stockings to sell at the next
Marymas fair.—And then I likened war to a calamity coming among them—the
callans drowned at their fishing—the lassies led to a misdoing—and the
feckless wee bairns laid on the bed of sickness, and their poor forlorn
mother sitting by herself at the embers of a cauldrife fire; her tow
done, and no a bodle to buy more; drooping a silent and salt tear for her
babies, and thinking of days that war gone, and, like Rachel weeping for
her children, she would not be comforted.  With this I concluded, for my
own heart filled full with the thought, and there was a deep sob in the
Church; verily it was Rachel weeping for her children.

In the latter end of the year, the man-of-war, with Charles Malcolm in
her, came to the tail of the Bank at Greenock, to press men as it was
thought, and Charles got leave from his captain to come and see his
mother; and he brought with him Mr. Howard, another midshipman, the son
of a great parliament man in London, which, as we have tasted the sorrow,
gave us some insight into the pomp of war, Charles was now grown up into
a fine young man, rattling, light-hearted, and just a cordial of
gladness, and his companion was every bit like him.  They were dressed in
their fine gold-laced garbs and nobody knew Charles when he came to the
clachan, but all wondered, for they were on horseback, and rode to the
house where his mother lived when he went away, but which was then
occupied by Miss Sabrina and her school.  Miss Sabrina had never seen
Charles, but she had heard of him; and when he enquired for his mother,
she guessed who he was, and showed him the way to the new house that the
captain had bought for her.

Miss Sabrina, who was a little overly perjink at times, behaved herself
on this occasion with a true spirit, and gave her lassies the play
immediately; so that the news of Charles’s return was spread by them like
wildfire, and there was a wonderful joy in the whole town.  When Charles
had seen his mother, and his sister Effie, with that douce and
well-mannered lad William, his brother—for of their meeting I cannot
speak, not being present—he then came with his friend to see me at the
manse, and was most jocose with me, and, in a way of great pleasance, got
Mrs. Balwhidder to ask his friend to sleep at the manse.  In short, we
had just a ploy the whole two days they stayed with us, and I got leave
from Lord Eaglesham’s steward to let them shoot on my lord’s land; and I
believe every laddie wean in the parish attended them to the field.  As
for old Lady Macadam, Charles being, as she said, a near relation, and
she having likewise some knowledge of his comrade’s family, she was just
in her element with them, though they were but youths; for she a woman
naturally of a fantastical, and, as I have narrated, given to comical
devices, and pranks to a degree.  She made for them a ball, to which she
invited all the bonniest lassies, far and near, in the parish, and was
out of the body with mirth, and had a fiddler from Irville; and it was
thought by those that were there, that had she not been crippled with the
rheumatics, she would have danced herself.  But I was concerned to hear
both Charles and his friend, like hungry hawks, rejoicing at the prospect
of the war, hoping thereby, as soon as their midship term was out, to be
made lieutenants; saving this, there was no allay in the happiness they
brought with them to the parish, and it was a delight to see how auld and
young of all degrees made of Charles; for we were proud of him, and none
more than myself, though he began to take liberties with me, calling me
old governor; it was, however, in a warm-hearted manner, only I did not
like it when any of the elders heard.  As for his mother, she deported
herself like a saint on the occasion.  There was a temperance in the
pleasure of her heart, and in her thankfulness, that is past the compass
of words to describe.  Even Lady Macadam, who never could think a serious
thought all her days, said, in her wild way that the gods had bestowed
more care in the making of Mrs. Malcolm’s temper, than on the bodies and
souls of all the saints in the calendar.  On the Sunday the strangers
attended divine worship, and I preached a sermon purposely for them, and
enlarged at great length and fulness on how David overcame Goliath; and
they both told me that they had never heard such a good discourse; but I
do not think they were great judges of preachings.  How, indeed, could
Mr. Howard know anything of sound doctrine, being educated, as he told
me, at Eton school, a prelatic establishment!  Nevertheless, he was a
fine lad; and though a little given to frolic and diversion, he had a
principle of integrity, that afterwards kythed into much virtue; for,
during this visit, he took a notion of Effie Malcolm, and the lassie of
him, then a sprightly and blooming creature, fair to look upon, and
blithe to see; and he kept up a correspondence with her till the war was
over, when being a captain of a frigate, he came down among us, and they
were married by me, as shall be related in its proper place.




CHAPTER XVIII
YEAR 1777


THIS may well be called the year of the heavy heart, for we had sad
tidings of the lads that went away as soldiers to America.  First, there
was a boding in the minds of all their friends that they were never to
see them more; and their sadness, like a mist spreading from the waters
and covering the fields, darkened the spirit of the neighbours.
Secondly, a sound was bruited about that the king’s forces would have a
hot and a sore struggle before the rebels were put down, if they were
ever put down.  Then came the cruel truth of all that the poor lads’
friends had feared.  But it is fit and proper that I should relate at
length, under their several heads, the sorrows and afflictions as they
came to pass.

One evening, as I was taking my walk alone, meditating my discourse for
the next Sabbath—it was shortly after Candlemas—it was a fine clear
frosty evening, just as the sun was setting.  Taking my walk alone, and
thinking of the dreadfulness of Almighty power, and how that, if it was
not tempered and restrained by infinite goodness, and wisdom, and mercy,
the miserable sinner, man, and all things that live, would be in a woeful
state, I drew near the beild where old Widow Mirkland lived by herself,
who was grand-mother to Jock Hempy, the ramplor lad, that was the second
who took on for a soldier.  I did mind of this at the time; but, passing
the house, I heard the croon, as it were, of a laden soul busy with the
Lord, and, not to disturb the holy workings of grace, I paused and
listened.  It was old Mizy Mirkland herself, sitting at the gable of the
house, looking at the sun setting in all his glory behind the Arran
hills; but she was not praying—only moaning to herself—an oozing out, as
it might be called, of the spirit from her heart, then grievously
oppressed with sorrow, and heavy bodements of grey hairs and
poverty.—“Yonder it slips awa’,” she was saying, “and my poor bairn,
that’s o’er the seas in America, is maybe looking on its bright face,
thinking of his hame, and aiblins of me, that did my best to breed him up
in the fear of the Lord; but I couldna warsle wi’ what was ordained.  Ay,
Jock! as ye look at the sun gaun down, as many a time, when ye were a wee
innocent laddie at my knee here, I hae bade ye look at him as a type of
your Maker, ye will hae a sore heart; for ye hae left me in my need, when
ye should hae been near at hand to help me, for the hard labour and
industry with which I brought you up.  But it’s the Lord’s will.  Blessed
be the name of the Lord, that makes us to thole the tribulations of this
world, and will reward us, through the mediation of Jesus, hereafter.”
She wept bitterly as she said this, for her heart was tried, but the
blessing of a religious contentment was shed upon her; and I stepped up
to her, and asked about her concerns, for, saving as a parishioner, and a
decent old woman, I knew little of her.  Brief was her story; but it was
one of misfortune.—“But I will not complain,” she said, “of the measure
that has been meted unto me.  I was left myself an orphan; when I grew
up, and was married to my gude-man, I had known but scant and want.  Our
days of felicity were few; and he was ta’en awa’ from me shortly after my
Mary was born.  A wailing baby, and a widow’s heart, was a’ he left me.
I nursed her with my salt tears, and bred her in straits; but the favour
of God was with us, and she grew up to womanhood as lovely as the rose,
and as blameless as the lily.  In her time she was married to a farming
lad.  There never was a brawer pair in the kirk, than on that day when
they gaed there first as man and wife.  My heart was proud, and it
pleased the Lord to chastise my pride—to nip my happiness, even in the
bud.  The very next day he got his arm crushed.  It never got well again;
and he fell into a decay, and died in the winter, leaving my Mary far on
in the road to be a mother.

                    [Picture: A morning consultation]

“When her time drew near, we both happened to be working in the yard.
She was delving to plant potatoes, and I told her it would do her hurt;
but she was eager to provide something, as she said, for what might
happen.  Oh! it was an ill-omened word.  The same night her trouble came
on, and before the morning she was a cauld corpse, and another wee wee
fatherless baby was greeting at my bosom—it was him that’s noo awa’ in
America.  He grew up to be a fine bairn, with a warm heart, but a light
head, and, wanting the rein of a father’s power upon him, was no sa douce
as I could have wished; but he was no man’s foe save his own.  I thought,
and hoped, as he grew to years of discretion, he would have sobered, and
been a consolation to my old age; but he’s gone, and he’ll never come
back—disappointment is my portion in this world, and I have no hope;
while I can do, I will seek no help, but threescore and fifteen can do
little, and a small ail is a great evil to an aged woman, who has but the
distaff for her breadwinner.”

I did all that I could to bid her be of good cheer, but the comfort of a
hopeful spirit was dead within her; and she told me, that by many tokens
she was assured her bairn was already slain.—“Thrice,” said she, “I have
seen his wraith—the first time he was in the pride of his young manhood,
the next he was pale and wan, with a bloody and gashy wound in his side,
and the third time there was a smoke, and, when it cleared away, I saw
him in a grave, with neither winding-sheet nor coffin.”

The tale of this pious and resigned spirit dwelt in mine ear, and, when I
went home, Mrs. Balwhidder thought that I had met with an o’ercome, and
was very uneasy; so she got the tea soon ready to make me better; but
scarcely had we tasted the first cup when a loud lamentation was heard in
the kitchen.  This was from that tawpy the wife of Thomas Wilson, with
her three weans.  They had been seeking their meat among the farmer
houses, and, in coming home, forgathered on the road with the Glasgow
carrier, who told them that news had come, in the _London Gazette_, of a
battle, in which the regiment that Thomas had listed in was engaged, and
had suffered loss both in rank and file; none doubting that their head
was in the number of the slain, the whole family grat aloud, and came to
the manse, bewailing him as no more; and it afterwards turned out to be
the case, making it plain to me that there is a farseeing discernment in
the spirit, that reaches beyond the scope of our incarnate senses.

But the weight of the war did not end with these afflictions; for,
instead of the sorrow that the listing caused, and the anxiety after, and
the grief of the bloody tidings, operating as wholesome admonition to our
young men, the natural perversity of the human heart was more and more
manifested.  A wonderful interest was raised among us all to hear of what
was going on in the world; insomuch, that I myself was no longer
contented with the relation of the news of the month in the _Scots
Magazine_, but joined with my father-in-law, Mr. Kibbock, to get a
newspaper twice a-week from Edinburgh.  As for Lady Macadam, who being
naturally an impatient woman, she had one sent to her three times a-week
from London, so that we had something fresh five times every week; and
the old papers were lent out to the families who had friends in the wars.
This was done on my suggestion, hoping it would make all content with
their peaceable lot; but dominion for a time had been given to the power
of contrariness, and it had quite an opposite effect.  It begot a
curiosity, egging on to enterprise; and, greatly to my sorrow, three of
the brawest lads in the parish, or in any parish, all in one day took on
with a party of the Scots Greys that were then lying in Ayr; and nothing
would satisfy the callans at Mr. Lorimore’s school, but, instead of their
innocent plays with girs, and shinties, and sicklike, they must go
ranking like soldiers, and fight sham-fights in bodies.  In short, things
grew to a perfect hostility, for a swarm of weans came out from the
schools of Irville on a Saturday afternoon, and, forgathering with ours,
they had a battle with stones on the toll-road, such as was dreadful to
hear of; for many a one got a mark that day he will take to the grave
with him.

It was not, however, by accidents of the field only, that we were
afflicted; those of the flood, too, were sent likewise against us.  In
the month of October, when the corn was yet in the holms, and on the cold
land by the river side, the water of Irville swelled to a great spait,
from bank to brae, sweeping all before it, and roaring, in its might,
like an agent of divine displeasure, sent forth to punish the inhabitants
of the earth.  The loss of the victual was a thing reparable, and those
that suffered did not greatly complain; for, in other respects, their
harvest had been plenteous: but the river, in its fury, not content with
overflowing the lands, burst through the sandy hills with a raging force,
and a riving asunder of the solid ground, as when the fountains of the
great deep were broken up.  All in the parish was a-foot, and on the
hills, some weeping and wringing their hands, not knowing what would
happen, when they beheld the landmarks of the waters deserted, and the
river breaking away through the country, like the war-horse set loose in
his pasture, and glorying in his might.  By this change in the way and
channel of the river, all the mills in our parish were left more than
half a mile from dam or lade; and the farmers through the whole winter,
till the new mills were built, had to travel through a heavy road with
their victual, which was a great grievance, and added not a little to the
afflictions of this unhappy year, which to me were not without a
particularity, by the death of a full cousin of Mrs. Balwhidder, my first
wife; she was grievously burnt by looting over a candle.  Her mutch,
which was of the high structure then in vogue, took fire, and being
fastened with corking-pins to a great toupee, it could not be got off
until she had sustained a deadly injury, of which, after lingering long,
she was kindly eased by her removal from trouble.  This sore accident was
to me a matter of deep concern and cogitation; but as it happened in
Tarbolton, and no in our parish, I have only alluded to it to show, that
when my people were chastised by the hand of Providence, their pastor was
not spared, but had a drop from the same vial.




CHAPTER XIX
YEAR 1778


THIS year was as the shadow of the bygane: there was less actual
suffering, but what we came through cast a gloom among us, and we did not
get up our spirits till the spring was far advanced; the corn was in the
ear, and the sun far towards midsummer height, before there was any
regular show of gladness in the parish.

It was clear to me that the wars were not to be soon over; for I noticed,
in the course of this year, that there was a greater christening of lad
bairns than had ever been in any year during my incumbency; and grave and
wise persons, observant of the signs of the times, said, that it had been
long held as a sure prognostication of war, when the births of male
children outnumbered that of females.

Our chief misfortune in this year was a revival of that wicked mother of
many mischiefs, the smuggling trade, which concerned me greatly; but it
was not allowed to it to make any thing like a permanent stay among us,
though in some of the neighbouring parishes, its ravages, both in morals
and property, were very distressing, and many a mailing was sold to pay
for the triumphs of the cutters and gaugers; for the government was by
this time grown more eager, and the war caused the king’s ships to be out
and about, which increased the trouble of the smugglers, whose wits in
their turn were thereby much sharpened.

After Mrs. Malcolm, by the settlement of Captain Macadam, had given up
her dealing, two maiden women, that were sisters, Betty and Janet Pawkie,
came in among us from Ayr, where they had friends in league with some of
the laigh land folk, that carried on the contraband with the Isle of Man,
which was the very eye of the smuggling.  They took up the tea-selling,
which Mrs. Malcolm had dropped, and did business on a larger scale,
having a general huxtry, with parliament-cakes, and candles, and
pincushions, as well as other groceries, in their window.  Whether they
had any contraband dealings, or were only back-bitten, I cannot take it
upon me to say; but it was jealoused in the parish that the meal in the
sacks, that came to their door at night, and was sent to the Glasgow
market in the morning, was not made of corn.  They were, however, decent
women, both sedate and orderly; the eldest, Betty Pawkie, was of a manly
stature, and had a long beard, which made her have a coarse look; but she
was, nevertheless, a worthy, well-doing creature, and at her death she
left ten pounds to the poor of the parish, as may be seen in the
mortification board that the session put up in the kirk as a
testification and an example.

Shortly after the revival of the smuggling, an exciseman was put among
us, and the first was Robin Bicker, a very civil lad that had been a
flunkey with Sir Hugh Montgomerie, when he was a residenter in Edinburgh,
before the old Sir Hugh’s death.  He was a queer fellow, and had a coothy
way of getting in about folk, the which was very serviceable to him in
his vocation; nor was he overly gleg: but when a job was ill done, and he
was obliged to notice it, he would often break out on the smugglers for
being so stupid, so that for an exciseman he was wonderful well liked,
and did not object to a waught of brandy at a time; when the auld wives
ca’d it well-water.  It happened, however, that some unneighbourly person
sent him notice of a clecking of tea chests, or brandy kegs, at which
both Jenny and Betty Pawkie were the howdies.  Robin could not but
therefore enter their house; however, before going in, he just cried at
the door to somebody on the road, so as to let the twa industrious
lassies hear he was at hand.  They were not slack in closing the
trance-door, and putting stoups and stools behind it, so as to cause
trouble, and give time before any body could get in.  They then emptied
their chaff-bed, and filled the tikeing with tea, and Betty went in on
the top, covering herself with the blanket, and graining like a woman in
labour.  It was thought that Robin Bicker himself would not have been
overly particular in searching the house, considering there was a woman
seemingly in the death-thraws; but a sorner, an incomer from the east
country, and that hung about the change-house as a divor hostler, that
would rather gang a day’s journey in the dark than turn a spade in
day-light, came to him as he stood at the door, and went in with him to
see the sport.  Robin, for some reason, could not bid him go away, and
both Betty and Janet were sure he was in the plot against them; indeed,
it was always thought he was an informer, and no doubt he was something
not canny, for he had a down look.

It was some time before the doorway was cleared of the stoups and stools,
and Jenny was in great concern, and flustered, as she said, for her poor
sister, who was taken with a heart-colic.  “I’m sorry for her,” said
Robin, “but I’ll be as quiet as possible;” and so he searched all the
house, but found nothing; at the which his companion, the divor east
country hostler, swore an oath that could not be misunderstood; so,
without more ado, but as all thought against the grain, Robin went up to
sympathize with Betty in the bed, whose groans were loud and vehement.
“Let me feel your pulse,” said Robin, and he looted down as she put forth
her arm from aneath the clothes, and laying his hand on the bed, cried,
“Hey! what’s this? this is a costly filling.”  Upon which Betty jumpet up
quite recovered, and Jenny fell to the wailing and railing, while the
hostler from the east country took the bed of tea on his back, to carry
it to the change-house, till a cart was gotten to take it into the
custom-house at Irville.

Betty Pawkie being thus suddenly cured, and grudging the loss of
property, took a knife in her hand, and as the divor was crossing the
burn at the stepping-stones that lead to the back of the change-house,
she ran after him and ripped up the tikeing, and sent all the tea
floating away on the burn, which was thought a brave action of Betty, and
the story not a little helped to lighten our melancholy meditations.

Robin Bicker was soon after this affair removed to another district, and
we got in his place one Mungo Argyle, who was as proud as a provost,
being come of Highland parentage.  Black was the hour he came among my
people; for he was needy and greedy, and rode on the top of his
commission.  Of all the manifold ills in the train of smuggling, surely
the excisemen are the worst, and the setting of this rabiator over us was
a severe judgment for our sins.  But he suffered for’t, and peace be with
him in the grave, where the wicked cease from troubling!

Willie Malcolm, the youngest son of his mother, had by this time learned
all that Mr. Lorimore, the schoolmaster, could teach; and as it was
evidenced to every body, by his mild manners and saintliness of
demeanour, that he was a chosen vessel, his mother longed to fulfil his
own wish, which was doubtless the natural working of the act of grace
that had been shed upon him; but she had not the wherewithal to send him
to the college of Glasgow, where he was desirous to study, and her just
pride would not allow her to cess his brother-in-law, the Captain
Macadam, whom, I should now mention, was raised in the end of this year,
as we read in the newspapers, to be a major.  I thought her in this
somewhat unreasonable, for she would not be persuaded to let me write to
the captain; but when I reflected on the good that Willie Malcolm might
in time do as a preacher, I said nothing more to her, but indited a
letter to the Lord Eaglesham, setting forth the lad’s parts, telling who
he was and all about his mother’s scruples; and, by the retour of the
post from London his lordship sent me an order on his steward, to pay me
twenty pounds towards equipping my protegée, as he called Willie, with a
promise to pay for his education, which was such a great thing for his
lordship to do off-hand on my recommendation, that it won much affection
throughout the country side; and folks began to wonder, rehearsing the
great things, as was said, that I had gotten my lord at different times,
and on divers occasions, to do, which had a vast of influence among my
brethren of the presbytery, and they grew into a state of greater
cordiality with me, looking on me as a man having authority; but I was
none thereat lifted up, for not being gifted with the power of a
kirk-filling eloquence, I was but little sought for at sacraments, and
fasts, and solemn days, which was doubtless well ordained; for I had no
motive to seek fame in foreign pulpits, but was left to walk in the paths
of simplicity within my own parish.  To eschew evil myself, and to teach
others to do the same, I thought the main duties of the pastoral office,
and with a sincere heart endeavoured what in me lay to perform them with
meekness, sobriety, and a spirit wakeful to the inroads of sin and Satan.
But oh, the sordiness of human nature!—The kindness of the Lord
Eaglesham’s own disposition was ascribed to my influence, and many a dry
answer I was obliged to give to applicants that would have me trouble his
lordship, as if I had a claim upon him.  In the ensuing year, the notion
of my cordiality with him came to a great head, and brought about an
event, that could not have been forethought by me as a thing within the
compass of possibility to bring to pass.




CHAPTER XX
YEAR 1779


I WAS named in this year for the General Assembly, and Mrs. Balwhidder,
by her continual thrift, having made our purse able to stand a shake
against the wind, we resolved to go into Edinburgh in a creditable
manner.  Accordingly, in conjunct with Mrs. Dalrymple, the lady of a
major of that name, we hired the Irville chaise, and we put up in
Glasgow, at the Black Boy, where we stayed all night.  Next morning, by
seven o’clock, we got into a fly-coach for the capital of Scotland, which
we reached after a heavy journey about the same hour in the evening, and
put up at the public where it stopped till the next day; for really both
me and Mrs. Balwhidder were worn out with the undertaking, and found a
cup of tea a vast refreshment.

Betimes, in the morning, having taken our breakfast, we got a caddy to
guide us and our wallise to Widow M‘Vicar’s, at the head of the
Covenanters’ Close.  She was a relation to my first wife, Betty Lanshaw,
my own full cousin that was, and we had advised her, by course of post,
of our coming, and intendment to lodge with her as uncos and strangers.
But Mrs. M‘Vicar kept a cloth shop, and sold plaidings and flannels,
besides Yorkshire superfines, and was used to the sudden incoming of
strangers, especially visitants, both from the West and the North
Highlands, and was withal a gawsy furthy woman, taking great pleasure in
hospitality, and every sort of kindliness and discretion.  She would not
allow of such a thing as our being lodgers in her house, but was so cagey
to see us, and to have it in her power to be civil to a minister, as she
was pleased to say, of such repute, that nothing less would content her
but that we must live upon her, and partake of all the best that could be
gotten for us within the walls of “the gude town.”

When we found ourselves so comfortable, Mrs. Balwhidder and me waited on
my patron’s family that was, the young ladies, and the laird, who had
been my pupil, but was now an advocate high in the law.  They likewise
were kind also.  In short, every body in Edinburgh were in a manner
wearisome kind, and we could scarcely find time to see the Castle and the
palace of Holyrood-house, and that more sanctified place, where the
Maccabeus of the Kirk of Scotland, John Knox, was wont to live.

Upon my introduction to his grace the Commissioner, I was delighted and
surprised to find the Lord Eaglesham at the levee, and his lordship was
so glad on seeing me, that he made me more kenspeckle than I could have
wished to have been in his grace’s presence; for, owing to the same, I
was required to preach before his grace, upon a jocose recommendation of
his lordship; the which gave me great concern, and daunted me so that in
the interim I was almost bereft of all peace and studious composure of
mind.  Fain would I have eschewed the honour that was thus thrust upon
me; but both my wife and Mrs. M‘Vicar were just lifted out of themselves
with the thought.

When the day came, I thought all things in this world were loosened from
their hold, and that the sure and steadfast earth itself was grown coggly
beneath my feet, as I mounted the pulpit.  With what sincerity I prayed
for help that day! and never stood man more in need of it; for through
all my prayer the congregation was so watchful and still, doubtless to
note if my doctrine was orthodox, that the beating of my heart might have
been heard to the uttermost corners of the kirk.

I had chosen as my text, from Second Samuel, xixth chapter and 35th
verse, these words—“Can I hear any more the voice of singing men and
singing women?  Wherefore, then, should thy servant be yet a burden to
the king?”  And hardly had I with a trembling voice read the words, when
I perceived an awful stir in the congregation; for all applied the words
to the state of the church, and the appointment of his grace the
Commissioner.  Having paused after giving out the text, the same fearful
and critical silence again ensued, and every eye was so fixed upon me,
that I was for a time deprived of courage to look about; but heaven was
pleased to compassionate my infirmity, and as I proceeded, I began to
warm as in my own pulpit.  I described the gorgeous Babylonian harlot
riding forth in her chariots of gold and silver, with trampling steeds
and a hurricane of followers, drunk with the cup of abominations, all
shouting with revelry, and glorying in her triumph, treading down in
their career those precious pearls, the saints and martyrs, into the mire
beneath their swinish feet.  “Before her you may behold Wantonness
playing the tinkling cymbal, Insolence beating the drum, and Pride
blowing the trumpet.  Every vice is there with his emblems; and the
seller of pardons, with his crucifix and triple crown, is distributing
his largess of perdition.  The voices of men shout to set wide the gates,
to give entrance to the queen of nations, and the gates are set wide, and
they all enter.  The avenging gates close on them—they are all shut up in
hell.”

There was a sough in the kirk as I said these words; for the vision I
described seemed to be passing before me as I spoke, and I felt as if I
had witnessed the everlasting destruction of Antichrist, and the
worshippers of the Beast.  But soon recovering myself, I said in a soft
and gentle manner, “Look at yon lovely creature in virgin-raiment, with
the Bible in her hand.  See how mildly she walks along, giving alms to
the poor as she passes on towards the door of that lowly dwelling—Let us
follow her in—She takes her seat in the chair at the bedside of the poor
old dying sinner; and as he tosses in the height of penitence and
despair, she reads to him the promise of the Saviour—‘This night thou
shalt be with me in Paradise;’ and he embraces her with transports, and,
falling back on his pillow, calmly closes his eyes in peace.  She is the
true religion; and when I see what she can do even in the last moments of
the guilty, well may we exclaim, when we think of the symbols and
pageantry of the departed superstition, Can I hear any more the voice of
singing men and singing women?  No; let us cling to the simplicity of the
Truth that is now established in our native land.”

At the conclusion of this clause of my discourse, the congregation, which
had been all so still and so solemn, never coughing, as was often the
case among my people, gave a great rustle, changing their positions, by
which I was almost overcome; however, I took heart and ventured on, and
pointed out that, with our Bible and an orthodox priesthood, we stood in
no need of the king’s authority, however bound we were, in temporal
things, to respect it; and I showed this at some length, crying out in
the words of my text, “Wherefore, then, should thy servant be yet a
burden to the king?” in the saying of which I happened to turn my eyes
towards his grace the Commissioner, as he sat on the throne, and I
thought his countenance was troubled, which made me add, that he might
not think I meant him any offence, “That the King of the Church was one
before whom the great, and the wise, and the good—all doomed and
sentenced convicts—implore his mercy.”  “It is true,” said I, “that in
the days of his tribulation he was wounded for our iniquities, and died
to save us; but, at his death, his greatness was proclaimed by the quick
and the dead.  There was sorrow, and there was wonder, and there was
rage, and there was remorse; but there was no shame there—none blushed on
that day at that sight but yon glorious luminary.”  The congregation
rose, and looked round, as the sun that I pointed at shone in at the
window.  I was disconcerted by their movement, and my spirit was spent,
so that I could say no more.

When I came down from the pulpit, there was a great pressing in of
acquaintance and ministers, who lauded me exceedingly; but I thought it
could be only in derision, therefore I slipped home to Mrs. M‘Vicar’s as
fast as I could.

Mrs. M‘Vicar, who was a clever, hearing-all sort of a neighbour, said my
sermon was greatly thought of, and that I had surprised everybody; but I
was fearful there was something of jocularity at the bottom of this, for
she was a flaunty woman, and liked well to give a good-humoured gibe or
jeer.  However, his grace the Commissioner was very thankful for the
discourse, and complimented me on what he called my apostolical
earnestness; but he was a courteous man, and I could not trust to him,
especially as my lord Eaglesham had told me in secrecy before—it’s true,
it was in his gallanting way—that, in speaking of the king’s servant as I
had done, I had rather gone beyond the bounds of modern moderation.
Altogether, I found neither pleasure nor profit in what was thought so
great an honour, but longed for the privacy of my own narrow pasture, and
little flock.

It was in this visit to Edinburgh that Mrs. Balwhidder bought her silver
teapot, and other ornamental articles; but this was not done, as she
assured me, in a vain spirit of bravery, which I could not have abided,
but because it was well known that tea draws better in a silver pot, and
drinks pleasanter in a china cup, than out of any other kind of cup or
teapot.

By the time I got home to the manse, I had been three whole weeks and
five days absent, which was more than all my absences together, from the
time of my placing; and my people were glowing with satisfaction when
they saw us driving in a Glasgow chaise through the clachan to the manse.

The rest of the year was merely a quiet succession of small incidents,
none of which are worthy of notation, though they were all severally, no
doubt, of aught somewhere, as they took us both time and place in the
coming to pass, and nothing comes to pass without helping onwards to some
great end; each particular little thing that happens in the world being a
seed sown by the hand of Providence to yield an increase, which increase
is destined, in its turn, to minister to some higher purpose, until at
last the issue affects the whole earth.  There is nothing in all the
world that doth not advance the cause of goodness; no, not even the sins
of the wicked, though, through the dim casement of her mortal tabernacle,
the soul of man cannot discern the method thereof.




CHAPTER XXI
YEAR 1780


THIS was, among ourselves, another year of few events.  A sound, it is
true, came among us of a design, on the part of the government in London,
to bring back the old harlotry of papistry; but we spent our time in the
lea of the hedge, and the lown of the hill.  Some there were that a panic
seized upon when they heard of Lord George Gordon, that zealous
Protestant, being committed to the Tower; but for my part, I had no
terror upon me, for I saw all things around me going forward improving;
and I said to myself, it is not so when Providence permits scathe and
sorrow to fall upon a nation.  Civil troubles, and the casting down of
thrones, is always forewarned by want and poverty striking the people.
What I have, therefore, chiefly to record as the memorables of this year,
are things of small import—the main of which are, that some of the
neighbouring lairds, taking example by Mr. Kibbock, my father-in-law that
was, began in this fall to plant the tops of their hills with mounts of
fir-trees; and Mungo Argyle, the exciseman, just herried the poor
smugglers to death, and made a power of prize-money, which, however, had
not the wonted effect of riches, for it brought him no honour; and he
lived in the parish like a leper, or any other kind of excommunicated
person.

But I should not forget a most droll thing that took place with Jenny
Gaffaw, and her daughter.  They had been missed from the parish for some
days, and folk began to be uneasy about what could have become of the two
silly creatures; till one night, at the dead hour, a strange light was
seen beaming and burning at the window of the bit hole where they lived.
It was first observed by Lady Macadam, who never went to bed at any
Christian hour, but sat up reading her new French novels and play-books
with Miss Sabrina, the schoolmistress.  She gave the alarm, thinking that
such a great and continuous light from a lone house, where never candle
had been seen before, could be nothing less than the flame of a burning.
And sending Miss Sabrina and the servants to see what was the matter,
they beheld daft Jenny, and her as daft daughter, with a score of candle
doups, (Heaven only knows where they got them!) placed in the window, and
the twa fools dancing, and linking, and admiring before the door.
“What’s all this about, Jenny,” said Miss Sabrina.—“Awa’ wi’ you, awa’
wi’ you—ye wicked pope, ye whore of Babylon—is na it for the glory of
God, and the Protestant religion? d’ye think I will be a pope as long as
light can put out darkness?”—And with that the mother and daughter began
again to leap and dance as madly as before.

It seems that poor Jenny, having heard of the luminations that were
lighted up through the country on the ending of the Popish Bill, had,
with Meg, travelled by themselves into Glasgow, where they had gathered
or begged a stock of candles, and coming back under the cloud of night,
had surprised and alarmed the whole clachan, by lighting up their window
in the manner that I have described.  Poor Miss Sabrina, at Jenny’s
uncivil salutation, went back to my lady with her heart full, and would
fain have had the idiots brought to task before the session, for what
they had said to her.  But I would not hear tell of such a thing, for
which Miss Sabrina owed me a grudge that was not soon given up.  At the
same time, I was grieved to see the testimonies of joyfulness for a holy
victory, brought into such disrepute by the ill-timed demonstrations of
the two irreclaimable naturals, that had not a true conception of the
cause for which they were triumphing.




CHAPTER XXII
YEAR 1781


IF the two last years passed o’er the heads of me and my people without
any manifest dolour, which is a great thing to say for so long a period
in this world, we had our own trials and tribulations in the one of which
I have now to make mention.  Mungo Argyle, the exciseman, waxing rich,
grew proud and petulant, and would have ruled the country side with a rod
of iron.  Nothing less would serve him than a fine horse to ride on, and
a world of other conveniences and luxuries, as if he had been on an
equality with gentlemen.  And he bought a grand gun, which was called a
fowling-piece; and he had two pointer dogs, the like of which had not
been seen in the parish since the planting of the Eaglesham-wood on the
moorland, which was four years before I got the call.  Every body said
the man was fey; and truly, when I remarked him so gallant and gay on the
Sabbath at the kirk, and noted his glowing face and gleg een, I thought
at times there was something no canny about him.  It was indeed clear to
be seen, that the man was hurried out of himself; but nobody could have
thought that the death he was to dree would have been what it was.

About the end of summer my Lord Eaglesham came to the castle, bringing
with him an English madam, that was his Miss.  Some days after he came
down from London, as he was riding past the manse, his lordship stopped
to enquire for my health, and I went to the door to speak to him.  I
thought that he did not meet me with that blithe countenance he was wont,
and in going away, he said with a blush, “I fear I dare not ask you to
come to the castle.”  I had heard of his concubine, and I said, “In
saying so, my lord, you show a spark of grace; for it would not become me
to see what I have heard; and I am surprised, my lord, you will not
rather take a lady of your own.”  He looked kindly, but confused, saying,
he did not know where to get one; so seeing his shame, and not wishing to
put him out of conceit entirely with himself, I replied, “Na, na, my
lord, there’s nobody will believe that, for there never was a silly Jock,
but there was as silly a Jenny,” at which he laughed heartily, and rode
away.  But I know not what was in’t; I was troubled in mind about him,
and thought, as he was riding away, that I would never see him again; and
sure enough it so happened; for the next day, being airing in his coach
with Miss Spangle, the lady he had brought, he happened to see Mungo
Argyle with his dogs and his gun, and my lord being as particular about
his game as the other was about boxes of tea and kegs of brandy, he
jumped out of the carriage, and ran to take the gun.  Words passed, and
the exciseman shot my lord.  Never shall I forget that day; such riding,
such running, the whole country side afoot; but the same night my lord
breathed his last; and the mad and wild reprobate that did the deed was
taken up and sent off to Edinburgh.  This was a woeful riddance of that
oppressor, for my lord was a good landlord and a kind-hearted man; and
albeit, though a little thoughtless, was aye ready to make his power,
when the way was pointed out, minister to good works.  The whole parish
mourned for him, and there was not a sorer heart in all its bounds than
my own.  Never was such a sight seen as his burial: the whole country
side was there, and all as solemn as if they had been assembled in the
valley of Jehoshaphat in the latter day.  The hedges where the funeral
was to pass were clad with weans, like bunches of hips and haws, and the
kirkyard was as if all its own dead were risen.  Never, do I think, was
such a multitude gathered together.  Some thought there could not be less
than three thousand grown men, besides women and children.

Scarcely was this great public calamity past, for it could be reckoned no
less, when one Saturday afternoon, as Miss Sabrina, the schoolmistress,
was dining with Lady Macadam, her ladyship was stricken with the
paralytics, and her face so thrown in the course of a few minutes, that
Miss Sabrina came flying to the manse for the help and advice of Mrs.
Balwhidder.  A doctor was gotten with all speed by express; but her
ladyship was smitten beyond the reach of medicine.  She lived, however,
some time after; but oh! she was such an object, that it was a grief to
see her.  She could only mutter when she tried to speak, and was as
helpless as a baby.  Though she never liked me, nor could I say there was
many things in her demeanour that pleased me; yet she was a free-handed
woman to the needful, and when she died she was more missed than it was
thought she could have been.

Shortly after her funeral, which was managed by a gentleman sent from her
friends in Edinburgh, that I wrote to about her condition, the Major, her
son, with his lady, Kate Malcolm, and two pretty bairns, came and stayed
in her house for a time, and they were a great happiness to us all, both
in the way of drinking tea, and sometimes taking a bit of dinner, their
only mother now, the worthy and pious Mrs. Malcolm, being regularly of
the company.

Before the end of the year, I should mention, that the fortune of Mrs.
Malcolm’s family got another shove upwards, by the promotion of her
second son, Robert Malcolm, who, being grown an expert and careful
mariner, was made captain of a grand ship, whereof Provost Maitland of
Glasgow, that was kind to his mother in her distresses, was the owner.
But that douce lad Willie, her youngest son, who was at the university of
Glasgow under the Lord Eaglesham’s patronage, was like to have suffered a
blight.  However, Major Macadam, when I spoke to him anent the young
man’s loss of his patron, said, with a pleasant generosity, he should not
be stickit; and, accordingly, he made up, as far as money could, for the
loss of his lordship; but there was none that made up for the great power
and influence, which, I have no doubt, the Earl would have exerted in his
behalf, when he was ripened for the church.  So that, although in time
William came out a sound and heart-searching preacher, he was long
obliged, like many another unfriended saint, to cultivate sand, and wash
Ethiopians in the shape of an east country gentleman’s camstrairy weans;
than which, as he wrote me himself, there cannot be on earth a greater
trial of temper.  However, in the end he was rewarded, and is not only
now a placed minister, but a doctor of divinity.

The death of Lady Macadam was followed by another parochial misfortune;
for, considering the time when it happened, we could count it as nothing
less.  Auld Thomas Howkings, the betheral, fell sick, and died in the
course of a week’s illness, about the end of November; and the measles
coming at that time upon the parish, there was such a smashery of the
poor weans as had not been known for an age; insomuch that James Banes,
the lad who was Thomas Howkings’ helper, rose in open rebellion against
the session during his superior’s illness; and we were constrained to
augment his pay, and to promise him the place if Thomas did not recover,
which it was then thought he could not do.  On the day this happened,
there were three dead children in the clachan, and a panic and
consternation spread about the burial of them when James Bane’s
insurrection was known, which made both me and the session glad to hush
up the affair, that the heart of the public might have no more than the
sufferings of individuals to hurt it.—Thus ended a year, on many
accounts, heavy to be remembered.




CHAPTER XXIII
YEAR 1782


ALTHOUGH I have not been particular in noticing it, from time to time,
there had been an occasional going off, at fairs and on market-days, of
the lads of the parish as soldiers, and when Captain Malcolm got the
command of his ship, no less than four young men sailed with him from the
clachan; so that we were deeper and deeper interested in the proceedings
of the doleful war that was raging in the plantations.  By one post we
heard of no less than three brave fellows belonging to us being slain in
one battle, for which there was a loud and general lamentation.

Shortly after this, I got a letter from Charles Malcolm, a very pretty
letter it indeed was: he had heard of my Lord Eaglesham’s murder, and
grieved for the loss, both because his lordship was a good man, and
because he had been such a friend to him and his family.  “But,” said
Charles, “the best way I can show my gratitude for his patronage, is to
prove myself a good officer to my king and country.”  Which I thought a
brave sentiment, and was pleased thereat; for somehow Charles, from the
time he brought me the limes to make a bowl of punch, in his pocket from
Jamaica, had built a nest of affection in my heart.  But, oh! the wicked
wastry of life in war.  In less than a month after, the news came of a
victory over the French fleet, and by the same post I got a letter from
Mr. Howard, that was the midshipman who came to see us with Charles,
telling me that poor Charles had been mortally wounded in the action, and
had afterwards died of his wounds.  “He was a hero in the engagement,”
said Mr. Howard, “and he died as a good and a brave man should.”—These
tidings gave me one of the sorest hearts I ever suffered, and it was long
before I could gather fortitude to disclose the tidings to poor Charles’s
mother.  But the callants of the school had heard of the victory, and
were going shouting about, and had set the steeple bell a-ringing, by
which Mrs. Malcolm heard the news; and knowing that Charles’s ship was
with the fleet, she came over to the manse in great anxiety to hear the
particulars, somebody telling her that there had been a foreign letter to
me by the postman.

When I saw her I could not speak, but looked at her in pity, and, the
tear fleeing up into my eyes, she guessed what had happened.  After
giving a deep and sore sigh, she enquired, “How did he behave?  I hope
well, for he was aye a gallant laddie!”—and then she wept very bitterly.
However, growing calmer, I read to her the letter; and, when I had done,
she begged me to give it to her to keep, saying, “It’s all that I have
now left of my pretty boy; but it’s mair precious to me than the wealth
of the Indies;” and she begged me to return thanks to the Lord for all
the comforts and manifold mercies with which her lot had been blessed,
since the hour she put her trust in him alone; and that was when she was
left a penniless widow, with her five fatherless bairns.

It was just an edification of the spirit to see the Christian resignation
of this worthy woman.  Mrs. Balwhidder was confounded, and said, there
was more sorrow in seeing the deep grief of her fortitude than tongue
could tell.

                         [Picture: The Old Herd]

Having taken a glass of wine with her, I walked out to conduct her to her
own house; but in the way we met with a severe trial.  All the weans were
out parading with napkins and kail-blades on sticks, rejoicing and
triumphing in the glad tidings of victory.  But when they saw me and Mrs.
Malcolm coming slowly along, they guessed what had happened, and threw
away their banners of joy; and standing all up in a row, with silence and
sadness, along the kirkyard wall as we passed, showed an instinct of
compassion that penetrated to my very soul.  The poor mother burst into
fresh affliction, and some of the bairns into an audible weeping; and,
taking one another by the hand, they followed us to her door, like
mourners at a funeral.  Never was such a sight seen in any town before.
The neighbours came to look at it as we walked along, and the men turned
aside to hide their faces; while the mothers pressed their babies
fondlier to their bosoms, and watered their innocent faces with their
tears.

I prepared a suitable sermon, taking as the words of my text, “Howl, ye
ships of Tarshish, for your strength is laid waste.”  But when I saw
around me so many of my people clad in complimentary mourning for the
gallant Charles Malcolm, and that even poor daft Jenny Gaffaw, and her
daughter, had on an old black riband; and when I thought of him, the
spirited laddie, coming home from Jamaica with his parrot on his
shoulder, and his limes for me, my heart filled full, and I was obliged
to sit down in the pulpit, and drop a tear.

After a pause, and the Lord having vouchsafed to compose me, I rose up,
and gave out that anthem of triumph, the 124th psalm, the singing of
which brought the congregation round to themselves; but still I felt that
I could not preach as I had meant to do; therefore I only said a few
words of prayer, and singing another psalm, dismissed the congregation.




CHAPTER XXIV
YEAR 1783


THIS was another Sabbath year of my ministry.  It has left me nothing to
record but a silent increase of prosperity in the parish.  I myself had
now in the bank more than a thousand pounds, and every thing was thriving
around.  My two bairns, Gilbert, that is now the merchant in Glasgow, was
grown into a sturdy ramplor laddie, and Janet, that is married upon Dr.
Kittleword, the minister of Swappington, was as fine a lassie for her
years as the eyes of a parent could desire to see.

Shortly after the news of the peace, an event at which all gave
themselves up to joy, a thing happened among us that at the time caused
much talk; but although very dreadful, was yet not so serious, some how
or other, as such an awsome doing should have been.  Poor Jenny Gaffaw
happened to take a heavy cold, and soon thereafter died.  Meg went about
from house to house, begging dead-clothes, and got the body straighted in
a wonderful decent manner, with a plate of earth and salt placed upon
it—an admonitory type of mortality and eternal life that has
ill-advisedly gone out of fashion.  When I heard of this, I could not but
go to see how a creature that was not thought possessed of a grain of
understanding, could have done so much herself.  On entering the door, I
beheld Meg sitting with two or three of the neighbouring kimmers, and the
corpse laid out on a bed.  “Come awa’, sir,” said Meg; “this is an
altered house.  They’re gane that keepit it bein; but, sir, we maun a’
come to this—we maun pay the debt o’ nature—death is a grim creditor, and
a doctor but brittle bail when the hour of reckoning’s at han’!  What a
pity it is, mother, that you’re now dead, for here’s the minister come to
see you.  Oh, sir! but she would have had a proud heart to see you in her
dwelling, for she had a genteel turn, and would not let me, her only
daughter, mess or mell wi’ the lathron lasses of the clachan.  Ay, ay,
she brought me up with care, and edicated me for a lady: nae coarse wark
darkened my lily-white hands.  But I maun work now; I maun dree the
penalty of man.”

Having stopped some time, listening to the curious maunnering of Meg, I
rose to come away; but she laid her hand on my arm, saying, “No, sir, ye
maun tast

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