The Little Minister | Page 8

who, in their colored nightcaps and corduroys
streaked with threads, gazed at her and Gavin. The little minister was
trying to look severe and old, but twenty-one was in his eye.
"Look, mother, at that white house with the green roof. That is the
manse."
The manse stands high, with a sharp eye on all the town. Every back
window in the Tenements has a glint of it, and so the back of the
Tenements is always better behaved than the front. It was in the front
that Jamie Don, a pitiful bachelor all his life because he thought the
women proposed, kept his ferrets, and here, too, Beattie hanged himself,
going straight to the clothes-posts for another rope when the first one
broke, such was his determination. In the front Sanders Gilruth openly
boasted (on Don's potato-pit) that by having a seat in two churches he
could lie in bed on Sabbath and get the credit of being at one or other.
(Gavin made short work of him.) To the right-minded the Auld Licht
manse was as a family Bible, ever lying open before them, but Beattie

spoke for more than him-self when he said, "Dagone that manse! I
never gie a swear but there it is glowering at me."
The manse looks down on the town from the northeast, and is reached
from the road that leaves Thrums behind it in another moment by a
wide, straight path, so rough that to carry a fraught of water to the
manse without spilling was to be superlatively good at one thing.
Packages in a cart it set leaping like trout in a fishing-creel. Opposite
the opening of the garden wall in the manse, where for many years
there had been an intention of putting up a gate, were two big stones a
yard apart, standing ready for the winter, when the path was often a
rush of yellow water, and this the only bridge to the glebe dyke, down
which the minister walked to church.
When Margaret entered the manse on Gavin's arm, it was a
whitewashed house of five rooms, with a garret in which the minister
could sleep if he had guests, as during the Fast week. It stood with its
garden within high walls, and the roof awing southward was carpeted
with moss that shone in the sun in a dozen shades of green and yellow.
Three firs guarded the house from west winds, but blasts from the north
often tore down the steep fields and skirled through the manse, banging
all its doors at once. A beech, growing on the east side, leant over the
roof as if to gossip with the well in the courtyard. The garden was to
the south, and was over full of gooseberry and currant bushes. It
contained a summer seat, where strange things were soon to happen.
Margaret would not even take off her bonnet until she had seen through
the manse and opened all the presses. The parlour and kitchen were
downstairs, and of the three rooms above, the study was so small that
Gavin's predecessor could touch each of its walls without shifting his
position. Every room save Margaret's had long-lidded beds, which
close as if with shutters, but hers was coff-fronted, or comparatively
open, with carving on the wood like the ornamentation of coffins.
Where there were children in a house they liked to slope the boards of
the closed-in bed against the dresser, and play at sliding down
mountains on them.
But for many years there had been no children in the manse. He in

whose ways Gavin was to attempt the heavy task of walking had been a
widower three months after his marriage, a man narrow when he came
to Thrums, but so large-hearted when he left it that I, who know there is
good in all the world because of the lovable souls I have met in this
corner of it, yet cannot hope that many are as near to God as he. The
most gladsome thing in the world is that few of us fall very low; the
saddest that, with such capabilities, we seldom rise high. Of those who
stand perceptibly above their fellows I have known very few; only Mr.
Carfrae and two or three women.
Gavin only saw a very frail old minister who shook as he walked, as if
his feet were striking against stones. He was to depart on the morrow to
the place of his birth, but he came to the manse to wish his successor
God-speed. Strangers were so formidable to Margaret that she only saw
him from her window.
"May you never lose sight of God, Mr. Dishart," the old man said in the
parlour. Then he added, as if he had asked too much,