nty years ago its every other room, earthen-floored and showing the
rafters overhead, had a handloom, and hundreds of weavers lived and
died Thoreaus "ben the hoose" without knowing it. In those days the
cup overflowed and left several houses on the top of the hill, where
their cold skeletons still stand. The road that climbs from the
square, which is Thrums's heart, to the north is so steep and straight,
that in a sharp frost children hunker at the top and are blown down
with a roar and a rush on rails of ice. At such times, when viewed
from the cemetery where the traveller from the schoolhouse gets his
first glimpse of the little town, Thrums is but two church steeples and
a dozen red stone patches standing out of a snow-heap. One of the
steeples belongs to the new Free Kirk, and the other to the parish
church, both of which the first Auld Licht minister I knew ran past
when he had not time to avoid them by taking a back wynd. He was but a
pocket edition of a man, who grew two inches after he was called; but
he was so full of the cure of souls, that he usually scudded to it with
his coattails quarrelling behind him. His successor, whom I knew
better, was a greater scholar, and said, "Let us see what this is in
the original Greek," as an ordinary man might invite a friend to
dinner; but he never wrestled as Mr. Dishart, his successor, did with
the pulpit cushions, nor flung himself at the pulpit door. Nor was he
so "hard on the Book," as Lang Tammas, the precentor, expressed it,
meaning that he did not bang the Bible with his fist as much as might
have been wished.

Thrums had been known to me for years before I succeeded the captious
dominie at the schoolhouse in the glen. The dear old soul who
originally induced me to enter the Auld Licht kirk by lamenting the
"want of Christ" in the minister's discourses was my first landlady.
For the last ten years of her life she was bedridden, and only her
interest in the kirk kept her alive. Her case against the minister was
that he did not call to denounce her sufficiently often for her sins,
her pleasure being to hear him bewailing her on his knees as one who
was probably past praying for. She was as sweet and pure a woman as I
ever knew, and had her wishes been horses, she would have sold them and
kept (and looked after) a minister herself.

There are few Auld Licht communities in Scotland nowadays--perhaps
because people are now so well off, for the most devout Au