wi' the gude man by the 'oor.
He wes the maist divertin' minister a' ever saw in the West Kirk."

It will be evident that Carmichael's visitation belonged to a different
department of art from that of Dr. Davidson. He arrived without
intimation by the nearest way that he could invent, clothed in a
shooting jacket and a soft hat, and accompanied by at least two dogs.
His coming created an instant stir, and Carmichael plunged at once into
the life of the household. It is kept on fond record, and still told
by the surviving remnant of his flock, that on various occasions and in
the course of pastoral visitation he had turned the hay in summer, had
forked the sheaves in harvest-time, had sacked the corn for market, and
had driven a gude wife's churn. After which honourable toil he would
eat and drink anything put before him except boiled tea, against which
he once preached with power--and then would sit indefinitely with the
family before the kitchen fire, telling tales of ancient history,
recalling the old struggles of Scottish men, describing foreign sights,
enlarging on new books, till he would remember that he had only dropped
in for an hour, and that two meals must be waiting for him at the
manse. His visits were understood to be quite unfinished, and he left
every house pledged to return and take up things at the point where he
had been obliged to break off, and so he came at last in this matter of
visitation into a condition of hopeless insolvency. His adventures
were innumerable and always enjoyable--falling off the two fir trees
that made a bridge over our deeper burns, and being dried at the next
farm-house--wandering over the moor all night and turning up at a
gamekeeper's at daybreak, covered with peat and ravening with
hunger--fighting his way through a snowstorm to a marriage, and digging
the bridegroom out of a drift--dodging a herd of Highland cattle that
thought he had come too near their calves, or driving off Drumsheugh's
polled Angus bull with contumely when he was threatening Mrs.
Macfadyen. If he met the bairns coming from school, the Glen rang with
the foolery. When Willie Harley broke his leg, Carmichael brought his
dog Jackie--I could tell things of that dog--and devised dramatic
entertainments of such attraction that Jamie Soutar declared them no
better than the theatre, and threatened Carmichael with a skep of honey
as a mark of his indignation. As for the old women of the Glen, he got
ro