, in which the preacher commends to the Fatherly care every
animate and inanimate thing not mentioned specifically in the foregoing
supplications. It was in the middle of this compendious petition, 'the
lang prayer,' that rheumatic old Scottish dames used to make a practice
of 'cheengin' the fit,' as they stood devoutly through it. "When the
meenister comes to the 'ingetherin' o' the Gentiles,' I ken weel it's
time to cheenge legs, for then the prayer is jist half dune," said a
good sermon-taster of Fife.

The organ is finding its way rapidly into the Scottish kirks (how can
the shade of John Knox endure a 'kist o' whistles' in good St. Giles'?),
but it is not used yet in some of those we attend most frequently.
There is a certain quaint solemnity, a beautiful austerity, in the
unaccompanied singing of hymns that touches me profoundly. I am often
carried very high on the waves of splendid church music, when the
organ's thunder rolls 'through vaulted aisles' and the angelic voices
of a trained choir chant the aspirations of my soul for me; and when
an Edinburgh congregation stands, and the precentor leads in that noble
paraphrase,

'God of our fathers, be the God
Of their succeeding race,'

there is a certain ascetic fervour in it that seems to me the perfection
of worship. It may be that my Puritan ancestors are mainly responsible
for this feeling, or perhaps my recently adopted Jenny Geddes is
a factor in it; of course, if she were in the habit of flinging
fauldstules at Deans, she was probably the friend of truth and the foe
of beauty, so far as it was in her power to separate them.

There is no music during the offertory in these churches, and this, too,
pleases my sense of the fitness of things. It cannot soften the woe
of the people who are disinclined to the giving away of money, and the
cheerful givers need no encouragement. For my part, I like to sit, quite
undistracted by soprano solos, and listen to the refined tinkle of
the sixpences and shillings, and the vulgar chink of the pennies and
ha'pennies, in the contribution-boxes. Country ministers, I am told,
develop such an acute sense of hearing that they can estimate the amount
of the collection before it is counted. There is often a huge pewter
plate just within the church door, in which the offerings are placed as
the worshippers enter or leave; and one always notes the preponderance
of silver at the morning, and of copper at the evening services. I