k and knew nothing about
ecclesiastical affairs, to that austere damsel, Margaret Meiklewham of
Pitscowrie, who had never prepared an appetising meal in her life, but
might have sat as an elder in the Presbytery.

Among all her class, Barbara MacCluckie stood an easy worst, being the
most incapable, unsightly, evil-tempered, vexatious woman into whose
hands an unmarried man had ever been delivered. MacWheep had his own
trials, but his ruler saw that he had sufficient food and some comfort,
but Barbara laid herself out to make the Rabbi's life a misery. He
only obtained his meals as a favour, and an extra blanket had to be won
by a week's abject humiliation. Fire was only allowed him at times,
and he secured oil for his lamp by stratagems. Latterly he was glad to
send strange ministers to Mains, and his boys alone forced lodgment in
the manse. The settlement of Barbara was the great calamity of the
Rabbi's life, and was the doing of his own good nature. He first met
her when she came to the manse one evening to discuss the unlawfulness
of infant baptism and the duty of holding Sunday on Saturday, being the
Jewish Sabbath. His interest deepened on learning that she had been
driven from twenty-nine situations through the persecution of the
ungodly; and on her assuring him that she had heard a voice in a dream
bidding her take charge of Kilbogie Manse, the Rabbi, who had suffered
many things at the hands of young girls given to lovers, installed
Barbara, and began to repent that very day. A tall, bony, forbidding
woman, with a squint and a nose turning red, as she stated, from
chronic indigestion, let it be said for her that she did not fall into
the sins of her predecessors. It was indeed a pleasant jest in
Kilbogie for four Sabbaths that she allowed a local Romeo, who knew not
that his Juliet was gone, to make his adventurous way to her bedroom
window, and then showed such an amazing visage that he was laid up for
a week through the suddenness of his fall. What the Rabbi endured no
one knew, but his boys understood that the only relief he had from
Barbara's tyranny was on Sabbath evening, when she stated her
objections to the doctrine, and threatened henceforward to walk into
Muirtown in order to escape from unsound doctrine. On such occasions
the Rabbi laid himself out for her instruction with much zest, and he
knew when he had produced an impression, for then he went supperless to
bed. Between this militant