This was the beginning of the mischief, and if I ever take to a criminal career, here was the first and primal cause.
Shortly after I went to Sabbath-school, and having been well trained by my father in controversial divinity, and drilled by my mother in the Catechism, I found myself in a fair way of distinguishing myself; but for all that, I cannot truly say that I ever got over the neckcloth on the back of Miss McBriar's chair. When I aired my free-thinking opinions before my father, and he shut me off by an appeal to authority, I kept silence and hugged myself.
"That may be a good enough argument," I said to myself, "but—I have seen a minister's neckcloth hung over the back of a chair, and shaving-soap on his chafts on Sabbath morning. How can you believe in revealed religion after that?"
But I had so much of solid common-sense, even in these my salad days, that I refrained from saying these things to my father. Indeed, I would not dare to say them now, even if I believed them, Willie McNair regarded the Sabbath-school much as I did. To both of us it was simply an imposition.
Willie thought so for two reasons—first and generally, because it was an innovation; and secondly, because he had to clean up the kirk after it. I agreed with him, because I was compelled to attend—the farm cert being delayed a whole hour in order that I might have the privilege of religious instruction by the senior licensed grocer of the little town. This gentleman had only one way of imparting knowledge. That was with the brass-edged binding of his pocket Bible. Even at that time I preferred the limp Oxford morocco. And so would you, if something so unsympathetic as brass corners were applied to the sides of your head two or three times every Sunday afternoon.
After several years of this experience, I passed into Henry Marchbank's class and was happy. But that is quite another chapter, and has nothing to do with Willie McNair.
Now, Sabbath-school was over about three o'clock, and our conveyance did not start till four. That is the way I became attached to Willie. I used to stay and help him to clean the kirk. This is the way he did it.
First, he unfrocked himself of his broadcloth dignity by hanging his coat upon a nail in the vestry. Then he put on an apron which covered him from gray chin-beard to the cracks in the uppers of his shining shoes. Into the breast of this envelope he thrust a duster large enough for a sheet. It was, in fact, a section of a departed pulpit swathing.
Then, muttering quite scriptural maledictions, and couching them in language entirely Biblical, Willie proceeded to visit the pews occupied by each class, restoring the "buiks" he had previously piled at the head of each seat to their proper places on the book-board in front, and scrutinising the woodwork for inscriptions in lead-pencil. Then he swept the crumbs and apple-cores carefully off the floor and delivered judgment at large.
"I dinna ken what Maister Osbourne was thinkin' on to begin sic a Popish whigmaleery as this Sabbath-schule! A disgrace an' a mockin' in the hoose o' God! What kens the like o' Sammle Borthwick aboot the divine decrees? When I, mysel', that has heard them treated on for forty year under a' the Elect Ministers o' the Land, can do no more than barely understand them to this day! And a wheen silly lasses, wi' gum-floo'ers in their bonnets to listen to bairns hummerin' ower 'Man's Chief End'! It's eneuch to gar decent Doctor Syminton turn in his grave! 'Man's Chief End'—faith—it's wumman's chief end that they're thinkin' on, the madams; they think I dinna see them shakin' their gum-floo'ers and glancing their e'en in the direction o' the onmarriet teacher bodies——"