Quintin Doonrise. A study in human nature

Front matter

A Study in Human Nature BY J. M'GAVIN SLOAN yc Author of '■ New Aids to Reflection " Sed trahit invitarr. nova vis ; aliudque Cupido, Mens aliud suadet ; video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor. — Ovid. ALEXANDER GARDNER iPubltaljfr to %tx ptajesti) ttjr -Jurm PAISLEY ; and 26 PATERNOSTER SQUARE, LONDON TO X 9. WHOSE FRIENDSHIP WAS PRECIOUS TO ME IN DARK, LONESOME, AND TRYING YEARS. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. — Hilltown, 9 II. — The Preaching on the Village Common, . 21 III. — The Unusual Hearers, .... 36 IV. — Preparing for the Twelfth, ... 52 V. — What the Village Knew, .... 77 VI. — The Decision, 95 VII. — The Shooting Days, 106 VIII. — Under the Sign of the Reindeer, . 124 IX. — Loneliness and Love, 14° X. — The Unexpected, 154 XI. — Mary's First Trouble, 171 XII. — Leaving Home, 187 XIII.— The Journey 203 XIV. — Deepening Shadows, 218 XV.— Social Collision, 232 XVI. — Inward Currents, 247 XVII.— Home Voices, 262 XVIII.— Rumour's Dark Cloud, 278 XIX. — On the Slopes of Avernus 294 XX.— Despair, 3°9 XXI.— Lost and Found, 325 XXII. — Anticlimax 34i XXIII.— Mr. Doonrise Discovers Himself, . . 358 XXIV.— The Day of Judgment 375 XXV. — Lights and Shadows

Chapter I

Hilltown. "Do human passions disturb the breast of nature even in her deepest solitudes ? " — Sir W. Scott. HPHE village of Hilltown, fifty years ago, was a quiet, sequestered dependence of an ancient estate in the Westlands of Scotland. Few more picturesque villages were, at that period, to be found in Sir Walter's " land of brown heath and shaggy wood." Hilltown was cozily situated in the mouth of a great dark glen, and at the head of the main reach of a broad valley. This verdant vale was watered by a considerable river, whose dark-blue current was lost for a while in a broad expanse of bog loch in the centre of the flats, which mirrored back towards the sky the outline of the green hills that kept watch and guard on either side, and carried on its placid bosom a reflection of every beauteous cloud that might float across the horizon from far among the wind-swept moors.

The natural peculiarity of the location of the village was the nearness of the surround ing hills. To this feature of the landscape the snug appearance of Hilltown was due. On three sides, the hills closed so compactly around rows of thatched cottages, that the village was almost wholly unperceived by the stranger, until his feet were within a few yards of the ancient inn, under the sign of the Reindeer. Here and there on the village street the monotonous whiz of the weaver's shuttle might then have been heard. In a small cottage, imperfectly lighted from without by a tiny window, the industrious and intelligent hand-loom weaver sat at his task, translating, with a conscience for his customer's interest and good-will, the fine fleece of the sheep that grazed on the green hillsides around, or nibbled at the daintier fare among the roots of the heather far into the sterner mountains to the south and west of Hilltown, into blankets, plaids, and other articles of domestic need for the sheep-farmer and the peasant.

The village was divided into two parts by a large burn — a tributary of the river already referred to — where in mild weather the " quack, quack " of the frequent duck bore eloquent testimony to the frugal habits of the villagers. By morning and at dusk, excepting the wilder and darkest days of mid-winter, a herd of cows gathered in the little primitive streets. Dividing at the traditional point, so many cows lazily moved towards the common land on the western side, while the rest ambled in the direction of the common-land to the south, of the village, according to certain immemorial grazing rights which appertained to the houses occupied by their owners. Hilltown was noted for its traditional wealth of common-land. The genuine native there, after the cus toms of his ancestors, eked out a comfortable mainten ance, reared and educated a family of brown or rosy children, by augmenting the honest pittance earned at the loom, or the shoemaker's stool, or the blacksmith's anvil, or the tailor's board, with the produce in kind of a large garden, a poultry yard, a " byre " for the cow, and HILLTOWN. 11 his " right " to pasturage on one portion or the other of the village common-land.

Thus, through many eras, little modified by wars or rumours of wars, never dreading French or other invasion, secure in remoteness from the seaboard, and with the hills for a rampart on all sides round, unaffected by changes on the throne or in the fortunes of political parties, unvisited by any ebbing wave of revolutionary agitation, this quiet village, the industrial and trading centre in its way of an extensive sheep-farming district, held on its course. Year in year out, Hilltown sent its small contingent of valorous sons and daughters into distant towns, rarely to disappear in the vortex of urban evil, but in many notable instances to bring credit and fame to the dear old village among the hills. At the particular date in the present century with which this narrative is concerned, the peculiarly Scotch questions of church, creed, minister, sermon, agitated the Hilltown mind in an unusual degree.

In those days, the Scottish peasant was born into the theological temperament. The passion for the abstract problems of theology had not then been transformed into a passion for democratic politics. Sectarian hostility was then the prototype of our modern political partizanship, and the churches had no appreciable measure of direct agency in political affairs. To the native of Hilltown, at that period, the life that now is was a very small matter in comparison with the life to come. What principles or laws, what party or statesmen, should be commissioned to govern Britain's expanding empire, was a subordinate consideration in Hilltown then before the awesome and engaging implications of the master question of the New Testament — " What shall a man give in exchange for his soul ? " The first half of our century had already passed into its waning years.

Behind the march of time lay the dead body of " Moderatism," that is, moral as opposed to doctrinal and evangelical preaching. Hot controversy regarding the scheme of redemption, and a passion for " saving souls," had superseded the theological luke warmness but profound and taciturn reverence, the rollicking humour but staunch integrity, which had characterized the school of the " Moderates " from the days of Robertson, the historian, and Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk. The curious question of the " Headship of Christ" in the Church, of the right (divine because sanctioned by the Bible) of the courts of ecclesiasticism to plant the Church, in all concerns of belief and disci pline, outside the jurisdiction and control of the State, and to prohibit any personal authority as vested in the legal patron from stepping between Christ and His elect people, had worked, with violence in some rural districts, towards the ultimate and now historical Disruption, which was accomplished under the leadership of Chal mers, Candlish, and their co-adjutors, resulting in the erection of a new Free Kirk in nigh every village in Scotland.

In all the parishes, at that time, the people were grouped here and there, engaged in earnest discus sion of the most recent movements on the part of the liberated Kirk. On the side of doctrine, the Church of Scotland had been mildly agitated, thirteen years or so earlier, by the expulsion from her communion of the learned and saintly John MacLeod Campbell, parish minister of Row, a rural parish on the shores of the lovely Gareloch, in the estuary of the Clyde, on account of certain alleged heretical opinions on the nature of the atonement. This incident, the fervent evangelical preaching HILLTOWN. 13 of Dr. Chalmers, the Bonars, Dr. Wardlaw, and many more true children of the Pauline and the Genevan succession, together with the presence, in startling manifestations, of " revivalism " in many parishes, awakened in the popular mind a restless feeling as to the necessity of correct opinion and belief as the condition of eternal salvation.

Given these particular modes at once of theological interest and of Church life in Scotland, it was inevitable that two old friends of the student of Church History should appear, viz., Calvinism and Arminianism. The creed of Calvin, as embodied and interpreted for the people in the Westminster Confession of Faith, was then the creed of Scotland. In its condensed form in the Shorter Catechism, this metaphysical concatenation was taught to the children in the village school. On the occasion of his annual visitation from house to house in the parish, the minister was accustomed to examine the household, servants included, in the Catechism. That little book, with its battle-array of metaphysical terms, bethumbed and soiled by daily, diligent perusal, through several generations, lay everywhere on the peasant's parlour table; and no more self-evident test of a neglected or imperfect education could be produced than the inability to repeat memoriter, and to the letter of the original, the questions on Foreordination, Predestination, Justification by Faith, and the rest.

Hilltown had long been famous for its experts in theology. At the time with which this tale has to do, Dissent there was in its cradle years. The Parish Kirk — " the guid auld Kirk o' Scotland " — was now a newly built beautiful edifice on the hill, overlooking the valley, its " steeple " seen from a great distance. For many years stray families of Secessionists, Relievers, Independents, had now and then come to reside in the village ; but it was not until the Disruption that a temple of Dis sent arose there, and somewhat disturbed the equilibrium of the gentleman and scholar, to whose care the souls of the parish and the broad acres of the glebe had been committed. At the Disruption a large Free Church was organized, and speedily achieved a name in the district as the home of bigoted Calvinism and sanctimonious piety, but none the less also the foster-nurse of morality and religion, of education and temperance, of social pro gress of every sort ; a new centre of philanthropy, admirably fitted to stir the stagnant pool of the Parish Kirk into a rush and gush of competitive activity.

The questions which clustered around the Disruption were rather of an ecclesiastical than of a theological nature, questions rather of polity than of creed. Dr. Chalmers adhered to the same creed after as before the historic withdrawal from the General Assembly. Indeed, the Disruptionists were more intelligent and rigorous as Calvinists than their brethren who elected to remain in the old ecclesiastical home, willing, as it was then phrased, to dwell at ease in Zion under patronage and the supremacy of the State. At the same time, the Dis ruptionists were men whose hearts the great Chalmers had touched into a rare and lovely moral earnestness. And this quality of passionate sincerity, when imported into the teaching, and preaching, and fireside discussion of the Confession of Faith, had the effect of rousing many intelligent minds into repugnance and revolt against the cruder dogmas ofthe Calvinian creed.

Such was the then theological outlook in our village of Hilltown. Several Arminians were discovered there, who refused to believe in unconditional election, and at tributed the soul's everlasting reprobation rather to man's HILLTOWN. ■5 free will than to the eternal decrees of God. The poems of Robert Burns had been extensively read, and his songs sung on the loom and at the bench, at marriages, curlers' suppers, and New Year's Day entertainments, for fifty years, among the peasantry around Hilltown. The Mossgiel ploughman's satire of William Fisher of Mauch line had not escaped the admiration and sympathy of a few readers in Hilltown; and already certain well-known villagers were quietly understood to be guilty of serious heresy, because, as they put it, they could not worship willingly and in love a God who should be approached in the terms of Holy Willie's Prayer : — " O Thou, wha in the heav'ns dost dwell, Wha, as it pleases best thysel', Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell, A' for thy glory, And no for ony guid or ill They've done afore thee !

" About this time, when the Disruption Calvinists were becoming a consolidated church in the parish of Hill town, these " Arminian bodies," as they were sometimes described, were informed that a scholarly, eloquent, and fervent young minister had been creating revival episodes in various parts of the north of Scotland by preaching the universal love of God, as against the limitations of the Calvinistic creed. They welcomed his message, as well in the costly and infrequent newspaper as in the letters of friends and the gossip of an occasional visitor to Hilltown. In those days the pious tramp was an in stitution among the hills, a man who earned bed and board by circulating the " news " from village to village, from farm to farm, and was always made welcome at the warm peat fire of the shepherd on the wild and lonely moors.

This public functionary carried his piety upon his lips and in his scanty wallet. He talked a great deal of the ways of Providence, and invoked a multitude of blessings upon the generous hand that might leave his wallet more heavy than before, and the prospect less dreary. Although scarcely proof against the temptation to embellish or spice dry fact with engaging fiction, this pious tramp was an useful agent of communication, when as yet railways, and daily, or even weekly, news papers, were in the pre-existent state. The information regarding the spread of the new theo logy was, among other items, communicated to Hill town by one or two persons of this now obsolete order of mendicant respectability. At length, to the joy of the two or three Arminians in the village, it was reported that the young minister in question had recently been ordained to the pastoral charge of a Secessionist congregation in the town of Lanewood, something like thirty miles distant from Hilltown.

The " new views," rumour said, had roused the whole town and district to a white heat of theological interest. Crowds, it was said, hung upon the lips of the earnest young heretic, and his bril liant rhetoric was the admiration and the envy even of his bitterest traducers. Every pew and passage in his church, it was said, was thronged on Sundays, and the very windows were obscured by the faces of the excluded multitude. Many peasants, it was reported, had travelled from a great distance in the early hours of a summer Sabbath to be present at the preaching ; and into every nook and corner of the old Lollard country, the intelli gence had been carried of the signs and wonders of Divine Grace with which Lanewood had been visited. Our Arminian friends followed, as distance and inade quate communication would allow, the fortunes of this popular fledgling of Scottish divinity.

His name was HILLTOWN. 17 the Reverend Ebenezer Lovegood. It was not long until the Presbytery of his church summoned him to its bar on a charge of heresy. A most interesting case arose, giving Mr. Idletongue and Mrs. Gossip, in every parish, a pressure of business for at least six months. The Presbytery affirmed that it was contrary to the Confession of Faith and to Holy Scripture to teach that all men might be saved, or that Christ had died for all. The true interpreter of Holy Writ, they argued, was John Calvin. The Pelagian and Arminian doctrine of man's free will, of individual responsibility for the eternal con dition of the soul, was a dangerous, nay, a blasphemous doctrine, being derogatory to the Sovereign Grace of God, and giving the people the impression that, if they wished, they might save themselves.

According to the ecclesiastical custom in Scotland, a majestic tournament of texts thereupon ensued. From Presbytery to Synod the Lovegood case passed. The bold, eloquent, scholarly, and slightly pugnacious Eben ezer manfully held his ground. He displayed a singular delight in notoriety and small martyrdom, which his friends attributed to personal consecration, his enemies to youthful vanity ; but to the more discerning and im partial mind, his joy in public work was the natural ex hilaration of a pure heart, finding the resources of culture available for the service of truth and of humankind. The result of the protracted trial and debate was the solemn deposition from the ministry of his parent sect of Mr. Lovegood. He was branded as a contumacious heretic. His own congregation followed him, accompanied by one or two other congregations ; and in every community there were some whom "dear Mr. Lovegood," as they called him, had charmed into the Arminian fold.

Mr. Lovegood's popularity was increased alike in range and in intensity by his small martyrdom at the hands of the fathers and brethren, whose conscientious zeal for " the ark of the Lord " marked them the worthy descendants of the brave men who in former days had troubled the Stuart kings, or marched into moss and moor under the banner of the Solemn League and Cove nant. Very soon the young reformer commenced the additional work of itinerant preaching from village to village between the Sundays. Wherever he went, eager crowds gathered to listen to what he fondly described as " the glad tidings of great joy to all people." " My heart's fu' o' joy this mornin'," said Mrs. Het terick, one of the few valiant Arminians in Hilltown, to her comrade in the battle of the texts, whose name was David or Davie Strongarm.

As the leading shoemaker in the parish, the representative of a family that had put conscience into the leather and the sewing, and shod the shepherds watertight for twenty miles around, through several generations, Davie was a man of some importance at once in his own opinion and in the estimation of the village. " What's makin' you sae joyfu' the day then, Jean ? " inquired the shoemaker, drawing upon the familiarity conferred by old acquaintance, near neighbourhood, and community of belief as an implied excuse for using Mrs. Hetterick's Christian name. " Losh man, Davie ! I ha'e gotten a letter frae my sister in Lanewood, an' she tells me that young Love good is comin' round this way next week. He's gaun round a' the villages, you ken, whare he may ha'e heard o' twa or three bodies that ha'e come tae a knowledge o' the truth.

He expects them tae get him a hearin'. Somebody's been guid eneugh tae tell him about us puir creatures among the hills here." HILLTOWN. 19 Mrs. Hetterick was a widow. She was a distinguished local expert in theology, who revelled in the warm de lights of a garrulous tongue. She might indulge in strong language now and then against her opponents ; but not infrequently she gave evidence of poetical taste, and con firmed the local tradition of her kinship with a minor poet, who achieved brief fame in that district, between the epoch of Burns's first burst of song and that created thirty years later by The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake, in whose all-sub duing light the race of small bards and rhymsters had been relegated to obscurity, notwithstanding Mrs. Het terick's frequent references to her gifted relative of older time, whose muse an ungrateful country had neglected.

" I'm unco glad tae hear the news," said Davie, with his hands in his trousers' pockets under his leather apron, but throwing back his head and laughing, moved by some delight in anticipation, until his small gray bonnet toppled on its bald peak, perilously near falling into the road. " It'll gang badly wi' our Calvinist neebours," Davie continued, " when Lovegood comes, if the half o' the things that I ha'e heard about him an' his learnin', an' his eloquence, an' his thumpin' o' the Bible to wauken up sinners, be true. Mayhap Jean, my woman, the hard hearts o' some o' the cronies at the Reindeer, wha mak' asses o' themsels wi' whuskey, 'ill be melted under the preachin' o' the Word. The Lord grant, Jean, that John Calvin, an' a' his misguided followers hereabouts, may get an awfu' dingin' ; and that mony puir graceless sin ners that tak' ower muckle whuskey an' never darken the Kirk door, or open the Bible, or say a grace, no tae men tion a prayer, may be waukened out o' the sleep o' unbelief, and led tae a knowledge o' the truth."

" Amen, Davie," rejoined the widow. " But we maun work, you ken, as weel as pray. It's no your doctrine or mine that the Lord works by some kin' o' magic, instead o' by human instrumentality. Tell a' bodies you may meet in the shop or in the road ; an' we'll ha'e a grand gatherin' on the Common the nicht young Maister Love good comes this way; an' mind, Davie, tae pray for guid weather. Let us dae our part, an' the Lord '11 be sure tae dae His." "Dinna fear, Jean," said the master cobbler, "you dinna need tae preach tae me, my guid woman. I'll tell a' the Calvinists tae get their texts ready, an' their com mentaries, an' try their hand on Lovegood about God electin' Jacob an' reprobatin' Esau, an' about the hard enin' o' puir Pharaoh's heart, an' a' their proofs o' foreor dination. Guid mornin', Mrs. Hetterick, I maun gang tae my stool."

Thus separated, for that day, the two leading repre sentatives of Arminian theology in Hilltown. Doubtless their daily toil was the sweeter and more agreeable to them on account of the good news which the morning had announced. And when the splendour of the sum mer evening came on, the psalm-singing, the reading out of the Bible, the earnest prayer, which formed their little nightly service of family worship, had a mysterious unc tion imported into it by the anticipation, which now nestled warm in the theologic heart, of a visit, and a ser mon on the village Common, from the Reverend Eben ezer Lovegood.

Chapter II

The Preaching on the Village Common. " Divine moment, when over the tempest-tossed Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken : Let there be Light ! Even to the greatest that has felt such a moment, is it not mira culous and God-announcing ; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest and least." — T. Carlyle. HPHE long sweet days of July were casting a succession of nature's rosy smiles upon the moorland country around Hilltown. As yet the shooting season had not commenced, nor was the heather in bloom on the hiU sides. But the neat little gardens in the village were already odorous with full-blown roses ; the stronger wild flowers — daisy, buttercup, harebell, foxglove, gorse, honeysuckle — -were lovely in their profusion in field, and glen, and brae ; the haymakers were preparing to mow the hay in the vaUey below Hilltown ; by dawn and dusk the angler journeyed to and from distant loch and stream, with mountain health glowing in his cheek ; and the outdoor Use of the village, from groups of merry young people on the Common to the old men seated in the shade of the village trees, had reached its mid summer height of gleesome brightness.

On one of those charming July afternoons in HU1 town, the village bellman appeared in the street, followed by a group of excited children competing for the chance of ringing the beU at the close of the regulation performance. He paused at a central point, and, ringing the sound old bell with the hand of a man " dressed in a little brief authority," then folding his arm over it, announced in tone of a stentor, but sufficiently on one side of his mouth to indicate to the knowing ones of the village, that he preferred whisky before theology any day, and for this reason had personally an imperfect sympathy with the burden of the proclamation, that the Reverend Ebenezer Lovegood, from Lanewood, pur posed preaching a sermon the same evening on the Common at eight o' the clock. "What will Maister Simple say to this, think ye?" asked Hugh Hastie, who combined in his complex per sonality the offices of grave-digger, beadle of the parish, and woolcarder in a small mill on the hillside, the wheel of which ran, when required, and seldom needed repairs on account of too much work.

Hugh had an old grudge against the bellman. In his opinion, that office also should have appertained to the parish beadle. He was accustomed to appear in the street, at the sound of the bell, to sniff contempt for his rival, and criticise alike the substance and form of the proclamation. " I'm no opposed to ony guid preacher comin' here," Hugh con tinued, "but" — speaking for his minister, to be sure, the sly dog ! — "Maister Simple thinks we hae had eneugh o' rinnin' awa' frae the auld Kirk this last year or twa, an' I'm sure he'll no like tae see the parish disturbed wi' ony mair converts tae new-fangled doctrines." Hastie's nearest fellow-villager at this moment was Doctor Chatto, a shrewd Aesculapian, who, although in the position of proud leadership in Hilltown in all matters of culture, dress, manners, toasts, speeches, con descended to chat with the beadle for the sake of the pleasure which he derived from Hugh's humorous eccen tricities.

" Never mind, Hugh," said the Doctor, his rubicund face beaming with suppressed mirth, " it will make no difference either in the minister's stipend or in your own too small salary. Besides, we shall have something new to discuss over our toddy in the Reindeer; and best of all, it may tame and cage the eagle of Disruptionist pride, and make our neighbours a trifle more humble. They have been walking down to the new Kirk of late with an air of saintliness, as if to say, ' Behold ! we, the children of the glorious Disruption, are the Lord's elect people, and wisdom, and godliness, not to mention a wee drap at the Reindeer, will die with us.' " " Weel spoken, Doctor," shouted the beadle, in his fawning manner. " Nae doot ye're jist richt again. I hae often said that the Doctor should ha'e been a minister.

That clever an' eloquent tongue o' yours was ne'er intended o' Providence for onything less than the pulpit. But Doctor, I'll gang up tae the knowe, an' listen tae this new preacher wham Widow Hetterick brags sae muckle about ; an' I'll daunder down tae the Reindeer afterwards, an' tell you o' the sermon. Maybe I'll be in time for a drap o' toddy ; the beadle, you ken, Doctor, maun ha'e his 'drap o' the auld Kirk.'" Hugh Hastie's " Maister Simple " was the parish minister, to whom he owed passive obedience in all things, excepting only the trifles of the tongue. The Reverend John Simple was not only a graduate of Glas gow University, but a true gentleman, a pattern to the parish in whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. But scholarship, delicacy, precision, grace in conversation, a quiet earnestness in his pulpit work, were things forgotten or ignored by the highflyers, in view of the unpardonable offence of preaching " mere morality," and remaining, as they believed, in rebellious ignorance of the supremely important truth that " moral sermons could never save a soul."

The manse was situated on the outskirts of the village, a commodious, square house, with garden and glebe attached, screened from vulgar eyes by an avenue of umbrageous trees. Snugly ensconced inside the manse, a genial, smoking bachelor, Mr. Simple kept the noiseless tenor of his way, out of hearing of the bellman's announcement of the preaching on the Common. Evening drew on. Already the descending sun was gilding the sky with tints of red and gray ; warmth, peace, loveliness, seemed to possess Hilltown. The weather was favourable for most things, including Mr. Lovegood's mission. Soon as work was laid aside, and the evening meal disposed of, the villagers gathered in the street. The tongues of busybodies, who on such an occasion had a reputation to uphold for special informa tion, might have been heard among the quiet old hills around, as the question of the new preaching was discussed.

The hour approached. Cobbler Strongarm borrowed an oak-chair, with high back and broad seat, from one of his relations in the village, and carried it on his shoulder to the place on the Common, where Mr. Love good was expected to stand. This chair, so Davie thought, might be a capital open-air pulpit, and, since he knew that Mr. Lovegood was " nane o' your paper preachers, like puir Maister Simple," it would not be necessary to provide either table or desk. Passing groups of villagers on their way to the preaching, the doughty cobbler was more than once tempted to slacken his pace or pause under his burden, in order to challenge to warfare of debate the Calvinist Amalekites. But Mr. Lovegood was coming up behind. The report having spread in the village that Davie Strongarm, minus his leather apron, and in his Sunday coat, had placed the chair, the congregation was soon complete.

To the chagrin of some people, the assembly was a large one for Hilltown. The population of the parish in those days was somewhat under the thousand. No doubt the whispered understanding that no collec tion would be taken, had assisted many to attend, on the ground that " bawbees were scarce," and that their antagonism to voluntaryism and " the cadgin' for coppers o' the Free Kirk," would have been compro mised by even so small a collection as a bawbee. Mrs. Hetterick was there. She stood erect, with a gleam of self-flattery mingling with pious interest in her dark-blue eyes, in the circle immediately surrounding the chair, adorned in Sunday bonnet, best shawl, and "a braw silk gown," which her son had sent from Edin burgh last New-Year's Day. She had arrived early, meant to secure a good position in the throng, and miss not a word.