Prester John | Page 4

mild and bright
for the time of year. I had been surfeited with the Thursday's and
Saturday's services, and the two long diets of worship on the Sabbath
were hard for a lad of twelve to bear with the spring in his bones and
the sun slanting through the gallery window. There still remained the
service on the Sabbath evening - a doleful prospect, for the Rev. Mr
Murdoch of Kilchristie, noted for the length of his discourses, had
exchanged pulpits with my father. So my mind was ripe for the
proposal of Archie Leslie, on our way home to tea, that by a little skill
we might give the kirk the slip. At our Communion the pews were
emptied of their regular occupants and the congregation seated itself as
it pleased. The manse seat was full of the Kirkcaple relations of Mr
Murdoch, who had been invited there by my mother to hear him, and it
was not hard to obtain permission to sit with Archie and Tam Dyke in
the cock-loft in the gallery. Word was sent to Tam, and so it happened
that three abandoned lads duly passed the plate and took their seats in
the cock-loft. But when the bell had done jowing, and we heard by the
sounds of their feet that the elders had gone in to the kirk, we slipped
down the stairs and out of the side door. We were through the
churchyard in a twinkling, and hot-foot on the road to the Dyve Burn. It
was the fashion of the genteel in Kirkcaple to put their boys into what

were known as Eton suits - long trousers, cut- away jackets, and
chimney-pot hats. I had been one of the earliest victims, and well I
remember how I fled home from the Sabbath school with the snowballs
of the town roughs rattling off my chimney-pot. Archie had followed,
his family being in all things imitators of mine. We were now clothed
in this wearisome garb, so our first care was to secrete safely our hats in
a marked spot under some whin bushes on the links. Tam was free from
the bondage of fashion, and wore his ordinary best knickerbockers.
From inside his jacket he unfolded his special treasure, which was to
light us on our expedition - an evil-smelling old tin lantern with a
shutter.
Tam was of the Free Kirk persuasion, and as his Communion fell on a
different day from ours, he was spared the bondage of church
attendance from which Archie and I had revolted. But notable events
had happened that day in his church. A black man, the Rev. John
Something-or-other, had been preaching. Tam was full of the portent.
'A nagger,' he said, 'a great black chap as big as your father, Archie.' He
seemed to have banged the bookboard with some effect, and had kept
Tam, for once in his life, awake. He had preached about the heathen in
Africa, and how a black man was as good as a white man in the sight of
God, and he had forecast a day when the negroes would have
something to teach the British in the way of civilization. So at any rate
ran the account of Tam Dyke, who did not share the preacher's views.
'It's all nonsense, Davie. The Bible says that the children of Ham were
to be our servants. If I were the minister I wouldn't let a nigger into the
pulpit. I wouldn't let him farther than the Sabbath school.'
Night fell as we came to the broomy spaces of the links, and ere we had
breasted the slope of the neck which separates Kirkcaple Bay from the
cliffs it was as dark as an April evening with a full moon can be. Tam
would have had it darker. He got out his lantern, and after a prodigious
waste of matches kindled the candle-end inside, turned the dark shutter,
and trotted happily on. We had no need of his lighting till the Dyve
Burn was reached and the path began to descend steeply through the
rift in the crags.

It was here we found that some one had gone before us. Archie was
great in those days at tracking, his ambition running in Indian paths. He
would walk always with his head bent and his eyes on the ground,
whereby he several times found lost coins and once a trinket dropped
by the provost's wife. At the edge of the burn, where the path turns
downward, there is a patch of shingle washed up by some spate. Archie
was on his knees in a second. 'Lads,' he cried, 'there's spoor here;' and
then after some nosing, 'it's a man's track, going downward, a big man
with flat feet. It's fresh, too, for it