64 The Little Minister

had flung the divit before he could stay his hand.
Then he shrank in horror.

“Woman!” he cried again.

“You are a dear,” she said, and vanished.

By the time Gavin was breathing freely again
the lock-up was crammed with prisoners, and the
Riot Act had been read from the town-house
stair. It is still remembered that the baron-
bailie, to whom this duty fell, had got no further
than “ Victoria, by the Grace of God,” when the
paper was struck out of his hands.

When a stirring event occurs up here we smack
our lips over it for months, and so I could still
write a history of that memorable night in Thrums.
I could tell how the doctor, a man whose shoul-
ders often looked as if they had been caught in a
shower of tobacco ash, brought me the news to
the schoolhouse, and now, when I crossed the
fields to dumfounder Waster Lunny with it, I
found Birse, the post, reeling off the story to him
as fast as a fisher could let out line. I know who
was the first woman on the Marywell brae to
hear the horn, and how she woke her husband,
and who heard it first at the Denhead and the
Tenements, with what they immediately said and
did. I had from Dite Deuchar’s own lips the
curious story of his sleeping placidly throughout
the whole disturbance, and on wakening in the
morning yoking to his loom as usual; and also
his statement that such ill luck was enough to
shake a man’s faith in religion. The police had
knowledge that enabled them to go straight to
the houses of the weavers wanted, but they some-
times brought away the wrong man, for such of