CHAPTER III.

THE NIGHT-WATCHERS.


What first struck Margaret in Thrums was the smell of the caddis.
The town smells of caddis no longer, but whiffs of it may be got
even now as one passes the houses of the old, where the lay still
swings at little windows like a great ghost pendulum. To me it is
a homely smell, which I draw in with a great breath, but it was as
strange to Margaret as the weavers themselves, who, in their
colored nightcaps and corduroys streaked with threads, gazed at
her and Gavin. The little minister was trying to look severe and
old, but twenty-one was in his eye.

"Look, mother, at that white house with the green roof. That is
the manse."

The manse stands high, with a sharp eye on all the town. Every
back window in the Tenements has a glint of it, and so the back of
the Tenements is always better behaved than the front. It was in
the front that Jamie Don, a pitiful bachelor all his life because
he thought the women proposed, kept his ferrets, and here, too,
Beattie hanged himself, going straight to the clothes-posts for
another rope when the first one broke, such was his determination.
In the front Sanders Gilruth openly boasted (on Don's potato-pit)
that by having a seat in two churches he could lie in bed on
Sabbath and get the credit of being at one or other. (Gavin made
short work of him.) To the right-minded the Auld Licht manse was
as a family Bible, ever lying open before them, but Beattie spoke