nts will be fully exposed, but a Presbytery wields a power at
which a bishop's hair would stand on end, and Doctor Dowbiggin once
made Carmichael leave the Communion Table and go into the vestry to put
on his bands.

When a Presbytery is in its lighter moods, it gives itself to points of
order with a skill and relish beyond the Southern imagination. It did
not matter how harmless, even infantile, might be the proposal placed
before the court by such a man as MacWheep of Pitscowrie, he has hardly
got past an apology for his presumption in venturing to speak at all,
before a member of Presbytery--who had reduced his congregation to an
irreducible minimum by the woodenness of his preaching--inquires
whether the speech of "our esteemed brother is not _ultra vires_" or
something else as awful. MacWheep at once sits down with the air of
one taken red-handed in arson, and the court debates the point till
every authority has taken his fill, when the clerk submits to the
Moderator, with a fine blend of deference and infallibility, that Mr.
MacWheep is perfectly within his rights; and then, as that estimable
person has, by this time, lost any thread he ever possessed, the
Presbytery passes to the next business--with the high spirit of men
returning from a holiday. Carmichael used, indeed, to relate how in a
great stress of business someone moved that the Presbytery should
adjourn for dinner, and the court argued for seventy minutes, with many
precedents, whether such a motion--touching as it did the standing
orders--could even be discussed, and with an unnecessary prodigality of
testimony he used to give perorations which improved with every telling.

The love of law diffused through the Presbytery became incarnate in the
clerk, who was one of the most finished specimens of his class in the
Scottish Kirk. His sedate appearance, bald, polished head, fringed
with pure white hair, shrewd face, with neatly cut side whiskers, his
suggestion of unerring accuracy and inexhaustible memory, his attitude
for exposition,--holding his glasses in his left hand and enforcing his
decision with the little finger of the right hand--carried conviction
even to the most disorderly. Ecclesiastical radicals, boiling over
with new schemes, and boasting to admiring circles of MacWheeps that
they would not be brow-beaten by red tape officials, became
ungrammatical before that firm gaze, and ended in abject surrender.
Self-contained and self-suffici