ld Lichts
were always poor, and their last years were generally a grim struggle
with the workhouse. Many a heavy-eyed, back-bent weaver has won his
Waterloo in Thrums fighting on his stumps. There are a score or two of
them left still, for, though there are now two factories in the town,
the clatter of the handloom can yet be heard, and they have been
starving themselves of late until they have saved up enough money to
get another minister.

The square is packed away in the centre of Thrums, and irregularly
built little houses squeeze close to it like chickens clustering round
a hen. Once the Auld Lichts held property in the square, but other
denominations have bought them out of it, and now few of them are even
to be found in the main streets that make for the rim of the cup. They
live in the kirk-wynd, or in retiring little houses the builder of
which does not seem to have remembered that it is a good plan to have a
road leading to houses until after they were finished. Narrow paths
straggling round gardens, some of them with stunted gates, which it is
commoner to step over than to open, have been formed to reach these
dwellings, but in winter they are running streams, and then the best
way to reach a house such as that of Tammy Mealmaker the wright,
pronounced wir-icht, is over a broken dyke and a pig-sty. Tammy, who
died a bachelor, had been soured in his youth by a disappointment in
love, of which he spoke but seldom. She lived far away in a town to
which he had wandered in the days when his blood ran hot, and they
became engaged. Unfortunately, however, Tammy forgot her name, and he
never knew the address; so there the affair ended, to his silent grief.
He admitted himself, over his snuff-mull of an evening, that he was a
very ordinary character, but a certain halo of horror was cast over the
whole family by their connection with little Joey Sutie, who was
pointed at in Thrums as the laddie that whistled when he went past the
minister. Joey became a pedlar, and was found dead one raw morning
dangling over a high wall within a few miles of Thrums. When climbing
the dyke his pack had slipped back, the strap round his neck, and
choked him.

You could generally tell an Auld Licht in Thrums when you passed him,
his dull vacant face wrinkled over a heavy wob. He wore tags of yarn
round his trousers beneath the knee, that looked like ostentatious
garters, and frequently his jacket of corduroy was put on bene