The Little Minister | Page 2

heard.
Gavin Dishart was barely twenty-one when he and his mother came to
Thrums, light-hearted like the traveller who knows not what awaits him
at the bend of the road. It was the time of year when the ground is
carpeted beneath the firs with brown needles, when split-nuts patter all
day from the beech, and children lay yellow corn on the dominie's desk
to remind him that now they are needed in the fields. The day was so
silent that carts could be heard rumbling a mile away. All Thrums was
out in its wynds and closes-- a few of the weavers still in
knee-breeches--to look at the new Auld Licht minister. I was there too,
the dominie of Glen Quharity, which is four miles from Thrums; and
heavy was my heart as I stood afar off so that Gavin's mother might not
have the pain of seeing me. I was the only one in the crowd who looked
at her more than at her son.
Eighteen years had passed since we parted. Already her hair had lost
the brightness of its youth, and she seemed to me smaller and more
fragile; and the face that I loved when I was a hobbledehoy, and loved
when I looked once more upon it in Thrums, and always shall love till I
die, was soft and worn. Margaret was an old woman, and she was only
forty-three: and I am the man who made her old. As Gavin put his
eager boyish face out at the carriage window, many saw that he was
holding her hand, but none could be glad at the sight as the dominie
was glad, looking on at a happiness in which he dared not mingle.

Margaret was crying because she was so proud of her boy. Women do
that. Poor sons to be proud of, good mothers, but I would not have you
dry those tears.
When the little minister looked out at the carriage window, many of the
people drew back humbly, but a little boy in a red frock with black
spots pressed forward and offered him a sticky parly, which Gavin
accepted, though not without a tremor, for children were more terrible
to him then than bearded men. The boy's mother, trying not to look
elated, bore him away, but her face said that he was made for life. With
this little incident Gavin's career in Thrums began. I remembered it
suddenly the other day when wading across the wynd where it took
place. Many scenes in the little minister's life come back to me in this
way. The first time I ever thought of writing his love story as an old
man's gift to a little maid since grown tall, was one night while I sat
alone in the school-house; on my knees a fiddle that has been my only
living companion since I sold my hens. My mind had drifted back to
the first time I saw Gavin and the Egyptian together, and what set it
wandering to that midnight meeting was my garden gate shaking in the
wind. At a gate on the hill I had first encountered these two. It rattled in
his hand, and I looked up and saw them, and neither knew why I had
such cause to start at the sight. Then the gate swung to. It had just such
a click as mine.
These two figures on the hill are more real to me than things that
happened yesterday, but I do not know that I can make them live to
others. A ghost-show used to come yearly to Thrums on the merry
Muckle Friday, in which the illusion was contrived by hanging a glass
between the onlookers and the stage. I cannot deny that the comings
and goings of the ghost were highly diverting, yet the farmer of
T'nowhead only laughed because he had paid his money at the hole in
the door like the rest of us. T'nowhead sat at the end of a form where he
saw round the glass and so saw no ghost. I fear my public may be in the
same predicament. I see the little minister as he was at one-and-twenty,
and the little girl to whom this story is to belong sees him, though the
things I have to tell happened before she came into the world. But there
are reasons why she should see; and I do not know that I can provide

the glass for others. If they see round it, they will neither laugh nor cry
with Gavin and Babbie.
When Gavin came to Thrums he was as I am now, for the pages lay
before him on which he was to write his life. Yet he was not quite as I
am. The life of