Chapter 1 - Page 2

little minister looked out at the carriage window, many
of the people drew back humbly, but a little boy in a red frock
with black spots pressed forward and offered him a sticky parly,
which Gavin accepted, though not without a tremor, for children
were more terrible to him then than bearded men. The boy's mother,
trying not to look elated, bore him away, but her face said that
he was made for life. With this little incident Gavin's career in
Thrums began. I remembered it suddenly the other day when wading
across the wynd where it took place. Many scenes in the little
minister's life come back to me in this way. The first time I ever
thought of writing his love story as an old man's gift to a little
maid since grown tall, was one night while I sat alone in the
school-house; on my knees a fiddle that has been my only living
companion since I sold my hens. My mind had drifted back to the
first time I saw Gavin and the Egyptian together, and what set it
wandering to that midnight meeting was my garden gate shaking in
the wind. At a gate on the hill I had first encountered these two.
It rattled in his hand, and I looked up and saw them, and neither
knew why I had such cause to start at the sight. Then the gate
swung to. It had just such a click as mine.

These two figures on the hill are more real to me than things that
happened yesterday, but I do not know that I can make them live to
others. A ghost-show used to come yearly to Thrums on the merry
Muckle Friday, in which the illusion was contrived by hanging a
glass between the onlookers and the stage. I cannot deny that the
comings and goings of the ghost were highly diverting, yet the
farmer of T'nowhead only laughed because he had paid his money at
the hole in the door like the rest of us. T'nowhead sat at the end
of a form where he saw round the glass and so saw no ghost. I fear
my public may be in the same predicament. I see the little
minister as he was at one-and-twenty, and the little girl to whom
this story is to belong sees him, though the things I have to tell
happened before she came into the world. But there are reasons why
she should see; and I do not know that I can provide the glass for
others. If they see round it, they will neither laugh nor cry with
Gavin and Babbie.

When Gavin came to Thrums he was as I am now, for the pages lay
before him on which he was to write his life. Yet he was not quite
as I am. The life of every man is a diary in which he means to
write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when
he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. But
the biographer sees the last chapter while he is still at the
first, and I have only to write over with ink what Gavin has
written in