ry). The children were perched in the
front, Irma keeping firm and watchful guard over her brother, while in
the dimmer depths, seen from below as three sturdy pairs of shoulders
against the dusk of a garniture of tapistry, sat the three Cameronian
young men of Heathknowes.

Nothing could so completely and fully have certified the strength of my
grandmother's purpose than that she, a pillar of the Covenant, thus
complacently allowed her sons to frequent the public worship of an
uncovenanted and Erastian Establishment.

But there was at least one in the house of Heathknowes not to be so
misled by the outward graces of the body.

"Favour is vain and the eye of Him that sitteth in the heavens regardeth
it not," she was wont to say, "and if Rob and Thomas and Ebenezer come
to an ill end, mother, you will only have yourself to thank for it!"

"Nonsense, Jen," said her mother, "if you are prevented by your
infirmities from talkin' sense, at least do hold your tongue. Doctor
Gillespie is a Kirkman and a Moderate, but he is--well, he is the
Doctor, and never a word has been said against him for forty year, walk
and conversation both as becometh the Gospel----"

"Aye, but _is_ it the Gospel?" cried Jen, snipping out her words as with
scissors; "that's the question."

"When I require you, Janet Lyon, to decide for your mother what is
Gospel and what is not, I'll let ye ken," said my grandmother, "and if I
have accepted a responsibility from the Most High for these children, I
will do my best to render an account of my stewardship at the Great
White Throne. In the meantime, _you_ have no more right to task me for
it, than--than--Boyd Connoway!"

"There," cried Jen, slapping down the last dish which she had been
drying while her mother washed, "I declare, mother, I might just as well
not have a tongue at all. Whatever I say you are on my back. And as if
snubbing me were not enough, down you must come on me with the Great
White Throne!"

Her aggrieved voice made my grandmother laugh.

"Well-a-well!" she said, in her richly comfortable voice of a mother of
consolation, "you are of the tribe of Marthas, Jen, and you certainly
work hard enough for everybody to give your tongue a right to a little
trot now and then. You will have all the blessings, daughter
Janet--except that of the peacemaker. For it's in you to set folk by the
ears and you really can't help it. Though who you took it from is more
than I can imagine, with a