rkable in that part of the country. So Mr.
Symington left Bridge of Cairn passing rich on thirty pounds a year, and
retired with his deaf old housekeeper to the Clints of Drumore. Yet
forty years before, the Reverend Fergus Symington was counted the
luckiest young minister in the Stewartry; and many were the jokes made
in public-house parlours and in private houses about his mercenary
motives. He had married money. He had been wedded with much rejoicing to
the rich daughter of a Liverpool merchant, who had made a fortune not
too tenderly in the West Indian trade. Sophia Sugg was ten years the
senior of her husband, and her temper was uncertain, but Fergus
Symington honestly loved her. She had a tender and a kindly hearty and
he had met her in the houses of the poor near her father's
shooting-lodge in circumstances which did her honour. So he loved her,
and told her of it as simply as though she had been a penniless lass
from one of the small farms that made up the staple of his congregation.
They were married, and it is obvious what the countryside would say,
specially as there were many eyes that had looked not scornfully at the
handsome young minister.

"This, all this was in the golden time,
Long ago."

The mistress of the little white manse on the Cairn Water lived not
unhappily with her husband for four years, and was then laid with her
own people in the monstrous new family vault where her father lay in
state. She left two children behind her--a boy of two and an infant girl
of a few weeks.

The children had a nurse, Meysie Dickson, a girl who was already a woman
in staidness and steadfastness at fifteen. She had been in a kind of
half-hearted way engaged to be married to Weelum Lammitter, the grieve
at Newlands; but when the two bairns were left on her hand, she told
Weelum that he had better take Kirst Laurie, which Weelum Lammitter
promptly did. There was a furnished house attached to the grieveship,
and he could not let it stand empty any longer. Still, he would have
preferred Meysie, other things being equal. He even said so to Kirst
Laurie, especially when he was taking his tea--for Kirst was no baker.

So for twenty years the household moved on its quiet, ordered way in the
manse by the Water of Cairn. Then the boy, entering into the inheritance
devised to him by his mother's marriage-settlement, took the portion of
goods that pertained to him, and went his way into a far country, an