law, but I must admit my father made the practice run with
the precept, for more than once he refused to take back cattle lifted by
the Macgregors from us, because they had got over his march-stone.

But so far from permitting this latitude in the parish of Inneraora,
Kirk and State frowned it down, and sins far less heinous. The session
was bitterly keen on Sabbath-breakers, and to start on a Saturday night
a kiln-drying of oats that would claim a peat or two on Sabbath, was
accounted immorality of the most gross kind.

Much of this strict form, it is to be owned, was imported by the Lowland
burghers, and set up by the Lowland session of the English kirk, of
which his lordship was an elder, and the Highlanders took to it badly
for many a day. They were aye, for a time, driving their cattle through
the town on the Lord's day or stravaiging about the roads and woods, or
drinking and listening to pipers piping in the change-houses at time of
sermon, fond, as all our people are by nature, of the hearty open air,
and the smell of woods, and lusty sounds like the swing of the seas and
pipers playing old tunes. Out would come elders and deacons to scour the
streets and change-houses for them, driving them, as if with scourges,
into worship. Gaelic sermon (or Irish sermon, as the Scots called
it) was but every second Sabbath, and on the blank days the landward
Highlanders found in town bound to go to English sermon whether they
knew the language or not, a form which it would be difficult nowadays to
defend. And it was, in a way, laughable to see the big Gaels driven to
chapel like boys by the smug light burghers they could have crushed
with a hand. But time told; there was sown in the landward mind by the
blessing of God (and some fear of the Marquis, no doubt) a respect
for Christian ordinance, and by the time I write of there were no more
devout churchgoers and respecters of the law ecclesiastic than the
umquhile pagan small-clans of Loch Firme and the Glens.

It is true that Nicol Beg threatened the church-officer with his dirk
when he came to cite him before the session a few days after the splore
in Inneraora, but he stood his trial like a good Christian all the same,
he and half a score of his clan, as many as the church court could get
the names of. I was a witness against them, much against my will, with
John Splendid, the Provost, and other townsfolk.

Some other defaulters were dealt with before the Mac-Nicolls, a