rdinary requests. "Come in and tell me all about it."

The little, broad figure stepped within the doorway.

"I'm a' wat wi' the rain," again quoth the elfish voice, more genially,
"an' I'm no' fit to gang into a gentleman's hoose."

"Come into the dining-room," said the minister kindly.

"'Deed, an' ye'll no," interposed Betsy, who had been coming nearer.
"Ye'se juist gang into the study, an' I'll lay doon a bass for ye to
stand an' dreep on. Where come ye frae, laddie?"

"I am Tammas Gleg's laddie. My faither disna ken that I hae come to see
the minister," said the boy.

"The loon's no' wise!" muttered Betsy. "Could the back door no' hae
served ye?--Bringing fowk away through the hoose traikin' to open the
front door to you on sic a nicht! Man, ye are a peetifu' object!"

The object addressed looked about him. He was making a circle of wetness
on the floor. He was taken imperatively by the coat-sleeve.

"Ye canna gang into the study like that. There wad be nae dryin' the
floor. Come into the kitchen, laddie," said Betsy. "Gang yer ways ben,
minister, to your ain gate-end, an' the loon'll be wi' ye the noo."

So Betsy, who was accustomed to her own way in the manse of Blawrinnie,
drove Tammas Gleg's laddie before her into the kitchen, and the minister
went into the study with a kind of junior apostolic meekness. Then he
meditatively settled his hard circular collar, which he wore in the
interests of Life and Work, but privately hated with a deadly hatred, as
his particular form of penance.

It was no very long season that he had to wait, and before he had done
more than again lift up his interesting "authority," the door of the
study was pushed open and Betsy cried in, "Here he's!" lest there might
be any trouble in the identification. And not without some reason. For,
strange as was the figure which had stepped into the minister's lobby
out of the storm, the vision which now met his eyes was infinitely
stranger.

A thick-set body little over four and a half feet high, exceedingly
thick and stout, was surmounted with one of the most curious heads the
minister had ever seen. He saw a round apple face, eyes of extraordinary
brightness, a thin-lipped mouth which seemed to meander half-way round
the head as if uncertain where to stop. Betsy had arrayed this "object"
in a pink bed-gown of her own, a pair of the minister's trousers turned
up nearly to the knee in a roll the thickness of a man's wrist, and one
of