CHAPTER III
THE NIGHT - WATCHERS

HAT 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 coloured night-
caps 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 Tene-
ments 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-

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