minister's. It cannot be averred that
in what was said there was either "food or physic for the soul of man."
But not knowing himself to be in especial need of either the one or the
other, John missed nothing to which he had been accustomed all his days
to listen in the kirk.

"We had a good discourse," his mother would say, as they went slowly
home together, and John always assented. "Yes, mother, we had a good
discourse."

So John went most days to please his mother. But there came a day of
rain, and sleet, and bitter east wind, when, if her conscience would
have permitted, Mrs Beaton would have refrained from making her usual
suggestion about the propriety of honouring the Sabbath-day by going to
the kirk. As for John, he was no more afraid of the rain, and the
sleet, and the east wind than he was afraid of the summer sunshine; but
when he proposed to go to hear Mr Hume, the sound of the sleet and the
rain on the windows silenced any objection she might have had to his
going "once in a way, the day being wild and wintry," and she even added
a hope that he might "hear something to do him good."

This was at the very beginning of his acquaintance with the minister and
his family. If he had waited for a while, till the charm of their
friendliness and genuine kindness had wrought, till the time came when
he had seen with his own eyes, and heard with his own ears that which
proved his new friend to be different in some ways from the most of
those to whom he had all his life looked up as leaders and teachers, yet
not unworthy also to teach and to lead, John might have been better
prepared to get the good which his mother hoped for him. And yet he
might not. At any rate, it was to that dark day in the little kirk
that, in the years which came afterward, he looked back as the beginning
of "good" to him.

"A dismal hole," he called it, as he went in among the first and sat
down in a corner. It was scarcely barer or more dingy and dim than the
rest of the kirks in country places were in those days; but it was very
small, and it had windows only on one side. On that dark day it was
dismal, and it could not have been beautiful at any time. The chill of
the sleet and the wild east wind had got into it, and John wondered at
the folk who should choose, of their own free will, to pass two hours,
or even three, in the damp and gloom and dreariness. "There will be few
here to-day," thought he.

But they came one after