As the movements of Government officials were always mysterious, no one could tell whence the Collector had come, but it was known to a few that he was not really of Scots blood, and had not been bred in the Presbyterian Kirk. When his hand in the way of Church rule was heavy on the “North Free” and certain sought anxiously for grounds of revolt, they were apt to whisper that, after all, this man, who laid down the ecclesiastical law with such pedantic accuracy and such inflexible severity, was but a Gentile who had established himself in the true fold, or at most a proselyte of the gate. They even dared to ask what, in the matter of churches, he had been before he was appointed to Muirtown; and so unscrupulous and virulent are the mongers of sedition, as every student of history knows, that some insinuated that the Collector had been a Nonconformist; while others, considering that this violence could only overreach itself, contented themselves with allusions to Swedenborg. Most of his brethren treated him as if he had been within the covenant from the beginning, and had been granted the responsible privilege of Scots birth either because in course of time they had forgotten the fact of alien origin in face of every appearance to the contrary, or because, as we all need mercy, it is not wise to search too curiously into the dark chapters of a man's past. Upon his part the Collector had wonderfully adapted himself to the new environment, and it defied the keenest critic to find in him any trace of a former home. It is true that he did not use the Scots dialect, merely employing a peculiarly felicitous word at a time for purposes of effect, but he had stretched his vowels to the orthodox breadth, and could roll off the letter “r” with a sense of power. “Dour” he could say in a way that deceived even the elect Sometimes he startled the Presbytery with a sound like “Yah, yah,” which indicates the shallow sharpness of the English, instead of “He-e-er, he-e-er,” which reveals as in a symbol the solidity of the Scot; but then one cannot live in London for years--as an official must--and be quite unscathed; and an acute observer might mark a subdued smartness in dress--white tie instead of stock on sacrament Sabbaths--which was not indigenous; but then it must be allowed that one in his position was obliged to be, to a certain degree, a man of the world. No one ever caught him quoting a clause from the Prayer-Book on the rare occasions when he was heard at his family devotions, or breaking into a riotous “Hallelujah” in the midst of a sermon. If misfortune had thrown him into Episcopalian or Methodist folds in earlier years, he had since been thoroughly purged and cleansed. He had a way of alluding to “the Disruption principles laid down in 1843,” or “my younger brethren will allow me to say that the Disruption,” which was very convincing; and on the solitary occasion when he made a set speech in public--for his strength lay in silence