"What am I talkin' aboot, Saunders?" she would say, pausing in the midst of a commination upon some new and garish fashion in dress, or the late hours kept by certain young men not a thousand miles away.
"Oh, breaking the second commandment, as usual," he would reply; "discoursing of the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth!"
"Havers," she would reply, her face, however, glancing at him bright as a new-milled shilling, "your thochts were awa' on the mountains o' vainity! Naething richt waukens ye up but a minister to argue wi'!"
And, indeed, that was a true word. For though an unusually silent man, my father, Alexander (or Saunders) McQuhirr, liked nothing better than a minister to argue with—if one of the Kirk of Scotland, well and good. There was the Revolution Settlement, the Headship of Christ, the Power of the Civil Magistrate. My father enjoyed himself thoroughly, and if the minister chanced to be worthy, so did he. But it took a Cameronian or an Original Secession divine really to rouse within him, what my mother called "his bowels of wrath."
"There is a distinct Brownist strain in your opinions, Alexander," Mr. Osbourne would say—his own minister from the Kirk on the Hill. "Your father's name was not Abel for nothing!"[#]
[#] "Abel," "Jacob," "Abraham" were not common names in Scotland, and such as occurred in families during last century might generally be traced to the time of Cromwellian occupation. David and Samuel were the only really common Old Testament names at that time.
Mr. Osbourne generally reminded him of this when he had got the worse of some argument on the true inwardness of the Marrow Controversy. He did not like to be beaten, and my father was a dour arguer. Once it is recorded that the minister brought all the way up to Drumquhat on a Communion Friday—the "off-day" as it were of the Scottish Holy Week—the great Dr. Marcus Lawton himself from Edinburgh. It happened to be a wettish day in the lull between hay and harvest. My father was doing something in the outhouse where he kept his joinering tools, and the two ministers joined him there early in the forenoon. They were well into "Freewill" before my father was at the end of the board he had been planing. "Predestination" was the overword of their conversation at the noonday meal, which all three seemed to partake of as dispassionately as if they had been stoking a fire—this to the great indignation of my mother, who having been warned of the proposed honour, had given herself even more completely to hospitality than was habitual with her.
Mr. Osbourne, indeed, made a pretext of talking to her about the price of butter, and how her hens were laying. But she saw through him even as he spoke.
For, as she said afterwards, describing the scene, "I saw his lug cockit for what the ither twa were saying, and if it hadna been for the restrainin' grace o' God, I declare I wad hae telled him that butter was a guinea a pound in Dumfries market, and that my hens were laying a score o' eggs apiece every day—he never wad hae kenned that I was tellin' him a lee!"
All day the great controversy went on. Even now I can remember the echoes of it coming to me through the wet green leaves of the mallows my mother had planted along the south-looking wall. To this day I can hear the drip of the water from the slates mingling with such phrases as "the divine sovereignty," the "Covenant of Works," "the Adamic dispensation." I see the purple of the flowers and smell the sweet smell of the pine shavings. They seemed to my childish mind like three Titans hurling the longest words in the dictionary at each other. I know nothing wherewith to express the effect upon my mind of this day-long conflict save that great line in the fifth book of Paradise Lost: