When the service was over, about half of the people departed; the rest remained in their seats and prepared to enter upon their Sabbath exercises.  These latter were all Gaelic people, who had understood little or nothing of the English service.  The minister turned himself at once into a Gaelic preacher and repeated in that language the long exercises of the morning.  The sermon and perhaps the prayers were quite as enjoyable in Gaelic as in English, and the singing was a great improvement.  It was of the same Psalms, but the congregation chanted them in a wild and weird tone and manner, as wailing and barbarous to modern ears as any Highland devotional outburst of two centuries ago.  This service also lasted about two hours; and as soon as it was over the faithful minister, without any rest or refreshment, organized the Sunday-school, and it must have been half past three o’clock before that was over.  And this is considered a day of rest.

These Gaelic Christians, we were informed, are of a very old pattern; and some of them cling more closely to religious observances than to morality.  Sunday is nowhere observed with more strictness.  The community seems to be a very orderly and thrifty one, except upon solemn and stated occasions.  One of these occasions is the celebration of the Lord’s Supper; and in this the ancient Highland traditions are preserved.  The rite is celebrated not oftener than once a year by any church.  It then invites the neighboring churches to partake with it,—­the celebration being usually in the summer and early fall months.  It has some of the characteristics of a “camp-meeting.”  People come from long distances, and as many as two thousand and three thousand assemble together.  They quarter themselves without special invitation upon the members of the inviting church.  Sometimes fifty people will pounce upon one farmer, overflowing his house and his barn and swarming all about his premises, consuming all the provisions he has laid up for his family, and all he can raise money to buy, and literally eating him out of house and home.  Not seldom a man is almost ruined by one of these religious raids,—­at least he is left with a debt of hundreds of dollars.  The multitude assembles on Thursday and remains over Sunday.  There is preaching every day, but there is something besides.  Whatever may be the devotion of a part of the assembly, the four days are, in general, days of license, of carousing, of drinking, and of other excesses, which our informant said he would not particularize; we could understand what they were by reading St. Paul’s rebuke of the Corinthians for similar offenses.  The evil has become so great and burdensome that the celebration of this sacred rite will have to be reformed altogether.

Such a Sabbath quiet pervaded the street of Baddeck, that the fast driving of the Gaels in their rattling, one-horse wagons, crowded full of men, women, and children,—­released from their long sanctuary privileges, and going home,—­was a sort of profanation of the day; and we gladly turned aside to visit the rural jail of the town.