is
wife wanted a young girl for companion and to help her with the spinning,
and had thought of me as likely to show judgment in recommending one.
The girl must be sixteen, or thereabout, of decent behaviour and
tractable, no gadder or lover of finery, healthy, able to read, an early
riser, and, if possible, devout. For her parentage I need not trouble
myself, if I knew of a girl suitable in these other respects.

It happened that I had of late been contriving some odd work about the
manse for the girl Kirstie Maclachlan, not that the work needed doing, but
to help her old mother; for we had no assessment for the poor, and the
Session was often at its wits' end to provide relief, wherein as a man
without family cares I could better assist than some of my neighbours.
The girl's mother was a poor feckless creature who had left Wyliebank in
her youth to take service in Glasgow, and there, beguiled at first by some
villain, had gone from bad to worse through misguidance rather than
wantonness, and at last crept home to her native parish to starve, if by
starving she could save her child--then but an infant--from the city and
its paths of destruction. This, in part by her own courage, and in part
by the help of the charitable, she had managed to do, and lived to see
Kirstie grow to be a decent, religiously minded young woman. Nor did the
lass want for good looks in a sober way, nor for wit when it came to
reading books; but in speech she was shy beyond reason, and would turn red
and stammer if a stranger but addressed her. I think she could never
forget that her birth had been on the wrong side of the blanket, and,
supposing folks to be pitying her for it, sought to avoid them and their
kindness.

It was Kirstie, then, whom I ventured to commend to Mr. Johnstone for his
lady's requirements; and after some talk between us the good man sent for
her and was satisfied with her looks and the few answers which, in her
stammering way, she managed to return to his questions. When he set off
homeward it was on the understanding that she should follow him to Givens
on foot, which she did the next day with her stock of spare clothes in a
kerchief. Nor, although I twice visited Givens during her service there,
did I ever see her at the manse, but twice only before she returned to us
with the tale I am to set down--the first time at the burying of her
mother here in Wyliebank, and the second at Givens, when I was called
thither to