Speedily he pulled down
the manse and unroofed the kirk. He would willingly have ploughed up the
kirkyard, but this could not be. For a hundred years after he was gone,
the Rulewater folk still buried there.
Now, in Patrick Kerr's day, a Sacrament Sabbath was not quite what it is
now. They were solemn enough about the fencing of the tables, serious
and longfaced enough were ministers and elders as the bread and wine
were handed round, but the minister's wife, poor body, found it took her
all her time to preserve an earnest spirituality and to search her soul
as the roasts and pies and puddings spread out on the manse dining-table
haunted her anxious mind. Harder still, too, it was for a tired minister
and elders to abstain from all appearance of casuality as the
hospitality of the manse went on far into the afternoon, and the whisky
toddy had more than once gone the round of the table.
Seventeen years after the doing away with Abbotrule Parish there took
place at the manse of Southdean, after the Sacrament had been dispensed,
one of these gatherings of sanctified conviviality. It was dusk before
the party broke up, and it was probably due to the kindly forethought of
the minister that he and his guests strolled in little companies of
two's and three's out into the caller air before their final parting.
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