Chapter 4

FIRST COMING OF THE EGYPTIAN WOMAN.

A learned man says in a book, otherwise beautiful with truth, that
villages are family groups. To him Thrums would only be a village,
though town is the word we have ever used, and this is not true of
it. Doubtless we have interests in common, from which a place so
near (but the road is heavy) as Tilliedrum is shut out, and we
have an individuality of our own too, as if, like our red houses,
we came from a quarry that supplies no other place. But we are not
one family. In the old days, those of us who were of the Tenements
seldom wandered to the Croft head, and if we did go there we saw
men to whom we could not always give a name. To flit from the
Tanage brae to Haggart's road was to change one's friends. A kirk-
wynd weaver might kill his swine and Tillyloss not know of it
until boys ran westward hitting each other with the bladders. Only
the voice of the dulsemen could be heard all over Thrums at once.
Thus even in a small place but a few outstanding persons are known
to everybody.

In eight days Gavin's figure was more familiar in Thrums than many
that had grown bent in it. He had already been twice to the
cemetery, for a minister only reaches his new charge in time to
attend a funeral. Though short of stature he cast a great shadow.
He was so full of his duties, Jean said, that though he pulled to
the door as he left the manse, he had passed the currant bushes
before it snecked. He darted through courts, and invented ways
into awkward houses. If you did not look up quickly he was round
the corner. His visiting exhausted him only less than his zeal in
the pulpit, from which, according to report, he staggered damp
with perspiration to the vestry, where Hendry Munn wrung him like
a wet cloth. A deaf lady, celebrated for giving out her washing,
compelled him to hold her trumpet until she had peered into all
his crannies, with the Shorter Catechism for a lantern. Janet
Dundas told him, in answer to his knock, that she could not abide
him, but she changed her mind when he said her garden was quite a
show. The wives who expected a visit scrubbed their floors for
him, cleaned out their presses for him, put diamond socks on their
bairns for him, rubbed their hearthstones blue for him, and even
tidied up the garret for him, and triumphed over the neighbours
whose houses he passed by. For Gavin blundered occasionally by
inadvertence, as when he gave dear old Betty Davie occasion to say
bitterly--

"Ou ay, you can sail by my door and gang to Easie's, but I'm
thinking you would stop at mine too if I had a brass handle on't."

So passed the first four weeks, and then came the fateful night of
the seventeenth of October, and with it the