Chapter 11

TELLS IN A WHISPER OF MAN'S FALL DURING THE CURLING SEASON.

No snow could be seen in Thrums by the beginning of the year,
though clods of it lay in Waster Lunny's fields, where his hens
wandered all day as if looking for something they had dropped. A
black frost had set in, and one walking on the glen road could
imagine that through the cracks in it he saw a loch glistening.
From my door I could hear the roar of curling stones at Rashie-
bog, which is almost four miles nearer Thrums. On the day I am
recalling, I see that I only made one entry in my diary, "At last
bought Waster Lunny's bantams." Well do I remember the
transaction, and no wonder, for I had all but bought the bantams
every day for a six months.

About noon the doctor's dog-cart was observed by all the Tenements
standing at the Auld Licht manse. The various surmises were wrong.
Margaret had not been suddenly taken ill; Jean had not swallowed a
darning-needle; the minister had not walked out at his study
window in a moment of sublime thought. Gavin stepped into the dog-
cart, which at once drove off in the direction of Rashie-bog, but
equally in error were those who said that the doctor was making a
curler of him.

There was, however, ground for gossip; for Thrums folk seldom
called in a doctor until it was too late to cure them, and McQueen
was not the man to pay social visits. Of his skill we knew
fearsome stories, as that, by looking at Archie Allardyce, who had
come to broken bones on a ladder, he discovered which rung Archie
fell from. When he entered a stuffy room he would poke his staff
through the window to let in fresh air, and then fling down a
shilling to pay for the breakage. He was deaf in the right ear,
and therefore usually took the left side of prosy people, thus, as
he explained, making a blessing of an affliction. "A pity I don't
hear better?" I have heard him say. "Not at all. If my misfortune,
as you call it, were to be removed, you can't conceive how I
should miss my deaf ear." He was a fine fellow, though brusque,
and I never saw him without his pipe until two days before we
buried him, which was five-and-twenty years ago come Martinmas.

"We're all quite weel," Jean said apprehensively as she answered
his knock on the manse door, and she tried to be pleasant, too,
for well she knew that, if a doctor willed it, she could have
fever in five minutes.

"Ay, Jean, I'll soon alter that," he replied ferociously. "Is the
master in?"

"He's at his sermon," Jean said with importance.

To interrupt the minister at such a moment seemed sacrilege to
her, for her up-bringing had been good. Her mother had once
fainted