The minister has a curious way of eating, which fascinates one to look at, while all the time there is a distinct feeling that an accident may happen at any moment. When tea was brought out he accepted some, and filled his mouth very full of cookie, stowing into it nearly a whole one at a time, and then raised his tea-cup to his lips. He persists in keeping his spoon in his cup as he drinks, and he prevents it from tumbling out by holding it with his thumb. A long draught of tea is then partaken of with a gurgling sound, and the minister swallows audibly. It is almost impossible to prevent one's self watching this process of eating and drinking during the whole of tea-time. For it seems so uncertain whether the spoon will remain in its place, and the cookie and the tea.
The minister is a very young man, with the pugnacity of an Edinburgh High School boy, and with the awful truthfulness which distinguishes his nation, but which is accentuated in such an alarming degree in a minister of the Kirk.
"I sent Kate a scent-bottle when she married," he remarked. "I won it at a bazaar for sixpence, so it was not expensive. I don't disapprove of raffles," he added, although he had not been asked for this piece of information—"that is, if ladies do not cheat over it, as they often do." Palestrina bristled at the insinuation, and the minister consoled her by saying: "Women sin in such wee ways—that's what I can't understand about them. However," he said, "I have never known a woman steal a thing yet that a man has not reaped some benefit by it. I can quote authority for my views from Adam and Eve downwards, to the newspapers of yesterday. I am engaged to be married myself, and I find the subject of feminine ethics absorbing. Good-bye," he said presently; "I hope you will not be disappointed with the clothes I hear you've ordered."
Alas! the tweed coat and skirt in which my sister hoped to rival the Miss Finlaysons proved an utter misfit, and she drove round the loch on the following day to take the garments back. Palestrina had prepared a severe reprimand for the tailor, but the old man took the wind out of her sails by stopping in amazement at the first word of annoyance which she uttered, and standing in the middle of the little fitting-room, with a yellow tape measure round his neck, and a piece of chalk in his hand, he shook his gray beard at us with something of apostolic fervour, and thus addressed us:—
"I'm amazed at ye! Do ye ever consider the system of planets, and that this world is one of the lesser points of light in space, and that even here there are countless millions of human beings, full of great resolves and high purposes. Get outside yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, and realize in the magnitude of the universe, and the immeasurable majesty of the planetary system, how small a thing is the ill-fit of a jacket."
We felt much humbled, Palestrina and I. And it was only when we were driving home afterwards that it even dimly suggested itself to us that we had right on our side at all. "After all," Palestrina said, "the coats did not fit; I really do not think he need have lectured us so severely."
At the time, however, I confess that our feelings were distinctly apologetic.
One wonders how a tailor who advanced the planetary system as a reproof to complaining customers would get on in London, and one realizes that English people have a great deal still to learn.