aturday night and baptized
in the kirk on the following forenoon.

To the casual observer the Auld Licht always looked as if he were
returning from burying a near relative. Yet when I met him hobbling
down the street, preternaturally grave and occupied, experience taught
me that he was preparing for a christening. How the minister would
have borne himself in the event of a member of his congregation's
wanting the baptism to take place at home it is not easy to say; but I
shudder to think of the public prayers for the parents that would
certainly have followed. The child was carried to the kirk through
rain, or snow, or sleet, or wind, the father took his seat alone in the
front pew, under the minister's eye, and the service was prolonged far
on into the afternoon. But though the references in the sermon to that
unhappy object of interest in the front pew were many and pointed, his
time had not really come until the minister signed to him to advance as
far as the second step of the pulpit stairs. The nervous father
clenched the railing in a daze, and cowered before the ministerial
heckling. From warning the minister passed to exhortation, from
exhortation to admonition, from admonition to searching questioning,
from questioning to prayer and wailing. When the father glanced up,
there was the radiant boy in the pulpit looking as if he would like to
jump down his throat. If he hung his head the minister would ask, with
a groan, whether he was unprepared; and the whole congregation would
sigh out the response that Mr. Dishart had hit it. When he replied
audibly to the minister's uncomfortable questions, a pained look at his
flippancy travelled from the pulpit all round the pews; and when he
only bowed his head in answer, the minister paused sternly, and the
congregation wondered what the man meant. Little wonder that Davie
Haggart took to drinking when his turn came for occupying that front
pew.

If wee Eppie Whamond's birth had been deferred until the beginning of
the week, or humility had shown more prominently among her mother's
virtues, the kirk would have been saved a painful scandal, and Sandy
Whamond might have retained his eldership. Yet it was a foolish but
wifely pride in her husband's official position that turned Bell
Dundas's head--a wild ambition to beat all baptismal record.

Among the wives she was esteemed a poor body whose infant did not see
the inside of the kirk within a fortnight of its bi