to go
many miles to church. They drove or rode (two on a horse), or walked
in from other glens. Without "the tents," therefore, the congregation,
with a long day before them, would have been badly off. Sometimes one
tent sufficed; at other times rival publicans were on the ground. The
tents were those in use at the feeing and other markets, and you could
get anything inside them, from broth made in a "boiler" to the fieriest
whisky. They were planted just outside the kirk-gate--long, low tents
of dirty white canvas--so that when passing into the church or out of
it you inhaled their odours. The congregation emerged austerely from
the church, shaking their heads solemnly over the minister's remarks,
and their feet carried them into the tent. There was no mirth, no
unseemly revelry, but there was a great deal of hard drinking.
Eventually the tents were done away with, but not until the services on
the Fast Days were shortened. The Auld Licht ministers were the only
ones who preached against the tents with any heart, and since the old
dominie, my predecessor at the schoolhouse, died, there has not been an
Auld Licht permanently resident in the glen of Quharity.

Perhaps nothing took it out of the Auld Licht males so much as a
christening. Then alone they showed symptoms of nervousness, more
especially after the remarkable baptism of Eppie Whamond. I could tell
of several scandals in connection with the kirk. There was, for
instance, the time when Easie Haggart saved the minister. In a fit of
temporary mental derangement the misguided man had one Sabbath day,
despite the entreaties of his affrighted spouse, called at the
post-office, and was on the point of reading the letter there received,
when Easie, who had slipped on her bonnet and followed him, snatched
the secular thing from his hands. There was the story that ran like
fire through Thrums and crushed an innocent man to the effect that Pete
Todd had been in an Edinburgh theatre countenancing the play-actors.
Something could be made, too, of the retribution that came to Chairlie
Ramsay, who woke in his pew to discover that its other occupant, his
little son Jamie, was standing on the seat divesting himself of his
clothes in presence of a horrified congregation. Jamie had begun
stealthily, and had very little on when Chairlie seized him. But
having my choice of scandals I prefer the christening one--the unique
case of Eppie Whamond, who was born late on S