Having arrived, the surprise and mutual courtesies were simply overpowering. Elspeth had not dreamed—the merest impulse had led her—she had been reading Lowe's poem the night before. It was really the only completely sheltered place for miles, where one could muse in peace. He knew it was, did he not?
But we must introduce this young man. If he had possessed a card it would have said: "The Rev. Allan Syme, B.A."
He was the new minister of the Cameronian Kirk at Cairn Edward. He has just been "called," chiefly because the other two on the short leet had not been considered sufficiently "firm" in their views concerning an "Erastian Establishment," as at the Kirk on the Hill they called the Church of Scotland nationally provided for by the Revolution Settlement.
In his trial discourses, however, Mr. Syme had proved categorically that no good had ever come out of any state-supported Church, that the ministers of the present establishment were little better than priests of the Scarlet Woman who sitteth on the Seven Hills, and that all those who trusted in them were even as the moles and the bats, children of darkness and travellers on the smoothly macadamised highway to destruction.
Nevertheless, at that free stave of Elspeth's carol Allan Syme went up hill as fast as if he had never preached a sermon on the text, "And Elijah girded up his loins and ran before Ahab unto the entering in of Jezreel."
At half-past eleven by the clock the minister of the Cameronian Kirk sat down beside this daughter of an Erastian Establishment.
Have you heard the leaves of beech and birch laugh as they clash and rustle? That is how the wicked summer woods of Airds laughed that day about Lowe's Seat.
* * * * *
Half a mile down the river there is a ferry boat which at infrequent intervals pushes a flat duck's bill across Dee Water. It is wide enough to take a loaded cart of hay, and long enough to accommodate two young horses tail to tail and yet leave room for the statutory flourishing of heels.
Bess MacTaggart could take it across with any load upon it you pleased, pushing easily upon an iron lever. They use a wheel now, but it was much prettier in the old days when all for a penny you could watch Bess lift the toothed lever with a sharp movement of her shapely arm, wet and dripping from the chain, as it slowly dredged itself up from the river bed.