‘Fat can ye no leaf a man alone for?’ he said aloud, reverting, as he did when he was excited, to his strong Highland accent.
Alec said no more; but Cameron, whose conscience was not quite at rest, chose to continue the subject.
‘I go to the kirk when I’m at home,’ he said, ‘an’ that’s enough. I go to please my mother, an’ keep folk from talking—but it’s weary work. I often ask myself what is the good of it?—the whole thing, I mean. There’s old Mr. Macfarlane, the parish minister of Glenstruan—we went to live on the mainland two years ago, you know. He’s a decent man—a ferry decent man. He ladles oot castor oil an’ cod-liver oil as occasion requires, to the haill parish, an’ the next ane tae, without fee or reward. He’s a great botanist, and spends half his time in his gairden—grows a’ sorts o’ fruit—even peaches, I’ve been told. When the weather’s suitable he gangs fishin’. On Sabbath he has apoot forty folk in his big barn o’ a kirk. He talks tae them for an oor, an’ lets them gang. He’s aye ready to baptize a wean, or pray wi’ a deein’ botoch,[2] but it’s seldom he has the chance. I’m no blamin’ the man. It’s no his faut that the folk gaed ower bodily to the Free Kirk at the Disruption, an’ left him, a shepherd wi’ ne’er a flock, but a wheen auld rams, wha——’
‘But there’s the Free Kirk,’ interrupted Alec, ‘and it’s your own kirk, I suppose.’
‘No,’ said Cameron. ‘If anything, I belong to the Establishment. Save me, is my daily an’ nichtly prayer, frae the bitter birr o’ the Dissenters.’
Alec laughed, and the other went on:
‘There’s Maister MacPhairson, the Free Kirk minister. He’s a wee, soor, black-avised crater, wi’ a wife an’ nine weans. Hoo he manages to gie them parritch an’ milk I can not imagine. He’s jist eaten up wi’ envy an’ spite that the parish minister has the big hoose, and he has the wee ane. He mak’s his sermons dooble as lang to let folk see that he does a’ the wark——’
‘A very good reason for not belonging to the Free Church,’ interposed Alec; ‘but I don’t see what all this has got to do with the question.’
‘I’m only showing that the religious system of this country is in a state of petrifaction,’ said Cameron, abandoning the Doric—‘fossilization, if you like it better.’
Alec laughed.