Not long before Gavin preached for our kirk and got
his call, a great event took place in the little room
at Glasgow. The student appeared for the first
time before his mother in his ministerial clothes.
He wore the black silk hat, that was destined to become
a terror to evil-doers in Thrums, and I dare say he
was rather puffed up about himself that day.
You would probably have smiled at him.
“It’s a pity I’m so little, mother,”
he said with a sigh.
“You’re no what I would call a particularly
long man,” Margaret said, “but you’re
just the height I like.”
Then Gavin went out in his grandeur, and Margaret
cried for an hour. She was thinking of me as
well as of Gavin, and as it happens, I know that I
was thinking at the same time of her. Gavin kept
a diary in those days, which I have seen, and by comparing
it with mine, I discovered that while he was showing
himself to his mother in his black clothes, I was
on my way back from Tilliedrum, where I had gone to
buy a sand-glass for the school. The one I bought
was so like another Margaret had used at Harvie that
it set me thinking of her again all the way home.
This is a matter hardly worth mentioning, and yet
it interests me.
Busy days followed the call to Thrums, and Gavin had
difficulty in forcing himself to his sermons when
there was always something more to tell his mother
about the weaving town they were going to, or about
the manse or the furniture that had been transferred
to him by the retiring minister. The little room
which had become so familiar that it seemed one of
a family party of three had to be stripped, and many
of its contents were sold. Among what were brought
to Thrums was a little exercise book, in which Margaret
had tried, unknown to Gavin, to teach herself writing
and grammar, that she might be less unfit for a manse.
He found it accidentally one day. It was full
of “I am, thou art, he is,” and the like,
written many times in a shaking hand. Gavin put
his arms round his mother when he saw what she had
been doing. The exercise book is in my desk now,
and will be my little maid’s when I die.
“Gavin, Gavin,” Margaret said many times
In those last days at Glasgow, “to think it
has all come true!”
“Let the last word you say in the house be a
prayer of thankfulness,” she whispered to him
when they were taking a final glance at the old home.
In the bare room they called the house, the little
minister and his mother went on their knees, but,
as it chanced, their last word there was not addressed
to God.
“Gavin,” Margaret whispered as he took
her arm, “do you think this bonnet sets me?”
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.
