Chapter 3

THE NIGHT-WATCHERS.

What first struck Margaret in Thrums was the smell of the caddis.
The town smells of caddis no longer, but whiffs of it may be got
even now as one passes the houses of the old, where the lay still
swings at little windows like a great ghost pendulum. To me it is
a homely smell, which I draw in with a great breath, but it was as
strange to Margaret as the weavers themselves, who, in their
colored nightcaps and corduroys streaked with threads, gazed at
her and Gavin. The little minister was trying to look severe and
old, but twenty-one was in his eye.

"Look, mother, at that white house with the green roof. That is
the manse."

The manse stands high, with a sharp eye on all the town. Every
back window in the Tenements has a glint of it, and so the back of
the Tenements is always better behaved than the front. It was in
the front that Jamie Don, a pitiful bachelor all his life because
he thought the women proposed, kept his ferrets, and here, too,
Beattie hanged himself, going straight to the clothes-posts for
another rope when the first one broke, such was his determination.
In the front Sanders Gilruth openly boasted (on Don's potato-pit)
that by having a seat in two churches he could lie in bed on
Sabbath and get the credit of being at one or other. (Gavin made
short work of him.) To the right-minded the Auld Licht manse was
as a family Bible, ever lying open before them, but Beattie spoke
for more than him-self when he said, "Dagone that manse! I never
gie a swear but there it is glowering at me."

The manse looks down on the town from the northeast, and is
reached from the road that leaves Thrums behind it in another
moment by a wide, straight path, so rough that to carry a fraught
of water to the manse without spilling was to be superlatively
good at one thing. Packages in a cart it set leaping like trout in
a fishing-creel. Opposite the opening of the garden wall in the
manse, where for many years there had been an intention of putting
up a gate, were two big stones a yard apart, standing ready for
the winter, when the path was often a rush of yellow water, and
this the only bridge to the glebe dyke, down which the minister
walked to church.

When Margaret entered the manse on Gavin's arm, it was a
whitewashed house of five rooms, with a garret in which the
minister could sleep if he had guests, as during the Fast week. It
stood with its garden within high walls, and the roof awing
southward was carpeted with moss that shone in the sun in a dozen
shades of green and yellow. Three firs guarded the house from west
winds, but blasts from the north often tore down the steep fields
and skirled through the manse, banging all