Chapter 10

FIRST SERMON AGAINST WOMEN.

On the afternoon of the following Sabbath, as I have said,
something strange happened in the Auld Licht pulpit. The
congregation, despite their troubles, turned it over and peered at
it for days, but had they seen into the inside of it they would
have weaved few webs until the session had sat on the minister.
The affair baffled me at the time, and for the Egyptian's sake I
would avoid mentioning it now, were it not one of Gavin's
milestones. It includes the first of his memorable sermons against
Woman.

I was not in the Auld Licht church that day, but I heard of the
sermon before night, and this, I think, is as good an opportunity
as another for showing how the gossip about Gavin reached me up
here in the Glen school-house. Since Margaret and her son came to
the manse I had kept the vow made to myself and avoided Thrums.
Only once had I ventured to the kirk, and then, instead of taking
my old seat, the fourth from the pulpit, I sat down near the
plate, where I could look at Margaret without her seeing me. To
spare her that agony I even stole away as the last word of the
benediction was pronounced, and my haste scandalised many, for
with Auld Lichts it is not customary to retire quickly from the
church after the manner of the godless U. P.'s (and the Free Kirk
is little better), who have their hats in their hand when they
rise for the benediction, so that they may at once pour out like a
burst dam. We resume our seats, look straight before us, clear our
throats and stretch out our hands for our womenfolk to put our
hats into them. In time we do get out, but I am never sure how.

One may gossip in a glen on Sabbaths, though not in a town,
without losing his character, and I used to await the return of my
neighbour, the farmer of Waster Lunny, and of Silva Birse, the
Glen Quharity post, at the end of the school-house path. Waster
Lunny was a man whose care in his leisure hours was to keep from
his wife his great pride in her. His horse, Catlaw, on the other
hand, he told outright what he thought of it, praising it to its
face and blackguarding it as it deserved, and I have seen him when
completely baffled by the brute, sit down before it on a stone and
thus harangue: "You think you're clever, Catlaw, my lass, but
you're mista'en. You're a thrawn limmer, that's what you are. You
think you have blood in you. You hae blood! Gae away, and dinna
blether. I tell you what, Catlaw, I met a man yestreen that kent
your mither, and he says she was a feikie fushionless besom. What
do you say to that?"

As for the post, I will say no more of him than that his bitter
topic was the unreasonableness of humanity, which treated him
graciously when he