Chapter 25

BEGINNING OF THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.

I can tell still how the whole of the glen was engaged about the
hour of noon on the fourth of August month; a day to be among the
last forgotten by any of us, though it began as quietly as a
roaring March. At the Spittal, between which and Thrums this is a
halfway house, were gathered two hundred men in kilts, and many
gentry from the neighboring glens, to celebrate the earl's
marriage, which was to take place on the morrow, and thither, too,
had gone many of my pupils to gather gossip, at which girls of six
are trustier hands than boys of twelve. Those of us, however, who
were neither children nor of gentle blood, remained at home, the
farmers more taken up with the want of rain, now become a
calamity, than with an old man's wedding, and their women-folk
wringing their hands for rain also, yet finding time to marvel at
the marriage's taking place at the Spittal instead of in England,
of which the ignorant spoke vaguely as an estate of the bride's.

For my own part I could talk of the disastrous drought with Waster
Lunny as I walked over his parched fields, but I had not such
cause as he to brood upon it by day and night; and the ins and
outs of the earl's marriage were for discussing at a tea-table,
where there were women to help one to conclusions, rather than for
the reflections of a solitary dominie, who had seen neither bride
nor bridegroom. So it must be confessed that when I might have
been regarding the sky moodily, or at the Spittal, where a free
table that day invited all, I was sitting in the school-house,
heeling my left boot, on which I have always been a little hard.

I made small speed, not through lack of craft, but because one can
no more drive in tackets properly than take cities unless he gives
his whole mind to it; and half of mine was at the Auld Licht
manse. Since our meeting six months earlier on the hill I had not
seen Gavin, but I had heard much of him, and of a kind to trouble
me.

"I saw nothing queer about Mr. Dishart," was Waster Lunny's
frequent story, "till I hearkened to Elspeth speaking about it to
the lasses (for I'm the last Elspeth would tell anything to,
though I'm her man), and syne I minded I had been noticing it for
months. Elspeth says," he would go on, for he could no more
forbear quoting his wife than complaining of her, "that the
minister'll listen to you nowadays wi' his een glaring at you as
if he had a perfectly passionate interest in what you were telling
him (though it may be only about a hen wi' the croup), and then,
after all, he hasna heard a sylib. Ay, I listened to Elspeth
saying that, when she thocht I was at the byre, and yet, would you
believe it, when I