Ann began to laugh in a helpless way. "It's funny. I know so well what impression I want to give, but when I try to write it down it's just nothing--stilted, meaningless sentences. I want to make a picture of Dr. Struthers. I've been trying for the last hour, labouring in rowing, covering my brow in wrinkles, with no result. How would you describe him?" Mrs. Douglas thought for a minute. "It would be difficult to make a true picture of him. If you simply told of the views that were his, how he wouldn't sing a paraphrase, let alone a hymn, and held the Sabbath day as something that must not be broken, you would give an impression of narrowness and rigid conservatism that wouldn't at all be the Dr. Struthers that we knew. When we heard that the Glasgow church had a senior minister, we thought it was a drawback; your father rather wondered how he would comport himself as a 'colleague and successor,' but we didn't know Dr. Struthers then. Sometimes, in Glasgow, when we were inclined to regret Kirkcaple and the flourishing congregation, and the peaceful time we enjoyed there--but when I say peaceful I mean only comparatively, no minister's wife ever attains to peace in this world!--your father would say, 'But if we had stayed in Kirkcaple we would never have known Dr. Struthers,' and that closed the matter. When I first met him I thought he was more like some fresh, hearty old country laird than a parson. But he was really very frail, and to walk even a short distance was a great effort. He had a place about fifty miles from Glasgow, Langlands, and as long as he was able he came to preach in Martyrs about once a month. The old congregation adored to have him come, but the newcomers, who had no romance about the old man, thought his sermons much too long. And they were too long as sermons go now. We are not the patient listeners our forefathers were. Dr. Struthers once said to me that no man could do justice to a subject under fifty-five minutes, and we used sometimes to think that he was done before his allotted time, but he just went on."