end o' the wedge," he warningly exclaimed, "and it's no' a far
cry noo to the candles an' the incense. They'll be bringin' ower the
pope next," and the kirk session, convening the next night, soon stopped
that leakage in their ancestral dyke.

Since then the precentor's box had preserved its lonely splendour.
Within it, in the far-back thunderous days of their great Boanerges, the
precentor stood to lead the swelling psalm as it rose from the seated
multitude--for they stood to pray, but sat to sing. From the
fast-gathering mists that now threaten those receding years, surviving
ones still rescue images of the precentor's ruffled locks, swept by the
pentecostal swirl--so seemed it to his worshippers--of Dr. Grant's
Geneva gown. And in this same box Sabbath after Sabbath appeared the
stalwart form of Archie M'Cormack, modern in nothing but his years.

His was a conservatism of the intense and passionate sort; not the
choice of his judgment, but the deepest element of his life. He no more
chose old ways, old paths, or the spirit of earlier times, than the
trout chooses water or the Polar bear its native snows. He was born not
among them, but of them, and remained till death their incarnate
descendant. No mere Scotch kirkman was Archie, but a prehistoric
Calvinist, a Presbyterian by the act of God and an elder from all
eternity. Even his youthful thoughts and imaginations adjusted
themselves to the scope of the Westminster Confession, abhorring any
horizon unillumined by the gray light which flowed in mathematical
exactitude from a hypothetical heart in the Shorter Catechism.

Although, strangely enough, Archie could never master the catechism. A
random question was his doom. Catechise him straight through, and his
response was swift and accurate. No thrust availed against him, a
knight invincible in his well-pieced coat of mail, a very dragon of
orthodoxy from whose lips there issued clouds of Calvinism, till the
minister himself was often well-nigh obscured thereby. But once dip
Archie into the middle of its mighty bosom to search an answer there,
and he would never reappear, or, if he haply might, it would be with
sorry fragments of divers answers in his hands, incongruous to
absurdity. Is not the same true of babbling guides in old cathedrals?

"What is sin?" the minister once suddenly asked Archie in the course of
catechetical visitation, the district being assembled at one central
house. Archie's answer, being a