s, along four
hundred yards of rocky shore. There was a little port, to attempt which
in a south-west wind was to risk an abrupt change of condition. This was
what made half of the men in the parish of Dour God-fearing men. The
other half feared the minister.

Abraham Ligartwood was the minister. He also feared God exceedingly, but
he made up for it by not regarding man in the slightest. The manse of
Dour was conspicuously set like a watch-tower on a hill--or like a
baron's castle above the huts of his retainers. The fishermen out on the
water made it their lighthouse. The lamp burned in the minister's study
half the night, and was alight long ere the winter sun had reached the
horizon.

Abraham Ligartwood would have been a better man had he been less
painfully good. When he came to the parish of Dour he found that he had
to succeed a man who had allowed his people to run wild. Dour was a
garden filled with the degenerate fruit of a strange vine.

The minister said so in the pulpit. Dour smiled complacently, and
considered that its hoary wickednesses would beat the minister in the
long-run. But Dour did not at that time know the minister. It was the
day of the free-traders. The traffic with the Isle of Man, whence the
hardy fishermen ran their cargoes of Holland gin and ankers of French
brandy, put good gear on the back of many a burgher's wife, and porridge
into the belly of many a fisherman's bairn.

The new minister found all this out when he came. He did not greatly
object. It was, he said, no part of his business to collect King
George's dues. But he did object when the running of a vessel's cargo
became the signal for half his parishioners settling themselves to a
fortnight of black, solemn, evil-hearted drinking. He said that he would
break up these colloguings. He would not have half the wives in the
parish coming to his kirk with black eyes upon the Lord's Sabbath day.

The parish of Dour laughed. But the parish of Dour was to get news of
the minister, for Abraham Ligartwood was not a man to trifle with.

One night there was a fine cargo cleanly run at Port Saint Johnston, the
village next to Dour. It was got as safely off. The "lingtowmen" went
out, and there was the jangling of hooked chains along all the shores;
then the troll of the smugglers' song as the cavalcade struck inwards
through the low shore-hills for the main free-trade route to Edinburgh
and Glasgow. The king's preventive men had notice, a