f already. The garden looked squalid and mean, without flowers,
with black patches peeping through the thin covering of snow, with a
row of winter greens opposite the southern window. He had never
noticed the Glen so narrow and bare before, nor how grey and unlovely
were the houses. Why had not the people better manners and some
brightness? they were not always attending funerals and making
bargains. What an occupation for an educated man to spend two hours in
a cabin of a vestry with a dozen labouring men, considering how two
pounds could be added to the Sustentation Fund, or preaching on Sunday
to a handful of people who showed no more animation than stone gods
except when the men took snuff audibly. Carmichael was playing the
spoiled child--not being at all a mature or perfect character, then or
now--and was ready to hit out at anybody. His bearing was for the
first and only time in his life supercilious, and his sermons were a
vicious attack on the doctrines most dear to the best of his people.
His elders knew not what had come over him, although Elspeth Macfadyen
was mysteriously apologetic, and in moments of sanity he despised
himself. One day he came to a good resolution suddenly, and went down
to see Rabbi Saunderson--the very thought of whose gentle, patient,
selfless life was a rebuke and a tonic.

When two tramps held conference on the road, and one indicated to the
other visibly that any gentleman in temporary distress would be treated
after a Christian fashion at a neighbouring house, Carmichael, who had
been walking in a dream since he passed the lodge, knew instantly that
he must be near the Free Kirk manse of Kilbogie. The means of
communication between the members of the nomadic profession is almost
perfect in its frequency and accuracy, and Saunderson's manse was a
hedge-side word. Not only did all the regular travellers by the north
road call on their going up in spring and their coming down in autumn,
but habitues of the east coast route were attracted and made a circuit
to embrace so hospitable a home, and even country vagrants made their
way from Dunleith and down through Glen Urtach to pay their respects to
the Rabbi. They had particular directions to avoid Barbara--expressed
forcibly on five different posts in the vicinity and enforced in
picturesque language, of an evening--and they were therefore careful to
waylay the Rabbi on the road, or enter his study boldly from the front.
The hu