Thrawn Janet

THE Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland
parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old
man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his
life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the
small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the
iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and
uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on the future
of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the
storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many young persons,
coming to prepare themselves against the season of the Holy
Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon
on lst Peter, v. and 8th, 'The devil as a roaring lion,' on the
Sunday after every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to
surpass himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the
matter and the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children
were frightened into fits, and the old looked more than usually
oracular, and were, all that day, full of those hints that Hamlet
deprecated. The manse itself, where it stood by the water of Dule
among some thick trees, with the Shaw overhanging it on the one
side, and on the other many cold, moorish hilltops rising towards
the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr. Soulis's
ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued
themselves upon their prudence; and guidmen sitting at the clachan
alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late
by that uncanny neighbourhood. There was one spot, to be more
particular, which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood
between the high road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each;
its back was towards the kirk-town of Balweary, nearly half a mile
away; in front of it, a bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied
the land between the river and the road. The house was two stories
high, with two large rooms on each. It opened not directly on the
garden, but on a causewayed path, or passage, giving on the road on
the one hand, and closed on the other by the tall willows and
elders that bordered on the stream. And it was this strip of
causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of Balweary so
infamous a reputation. The minister walked there often after dark,
sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers;
and when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more
daring schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to 'follow my
leader' across that legendary spot.

This atmosphere of terror, surrounding, as it did, a man of God of
spotless character and orthodoxy, was a common cause of wonder and
subject of inquiry among the few strangers who