Before he reached the bank, the cart and the mare, and poor Jock with them, had been swept over the edge of the unseen ford into the deep water below. Had Jock been free of the cart and horse he might have made some fight for his life, even in that caldron; but, from the marks upon his body, we judged that he had been struck, just when he loosed the chain, by the iron hoofs of the mare in her agony, and had been rendered unconscious. Within a second, horse and cart and man had disappeared, and the cruel river had triumphed and was satisfied. Three days afterward we rescued his body from her grasp; and when we carried it up to the bothy where he and his mates had lived together, the roughest of them felt that this man had been a hero. No doubt he ought not to have dared so much; but having dared, he did not flinch. His duty was that of every driver--to stick to the last by his horses--and he did it to the uttermost. He was a rough man, Jock, who never read anything except the stories in the weekly newspaper which used to circulate in the bothies. There were times when Jock took a glass too much on a fair-day at Muirtown, and then he was inclined to fight. His language, also, was not suited for polite society, and his temper was not always under perfect control. Let me say it plainly: Jock was nothing but a Scots plowman, and all he did that day was to save the life, not of a child or of a man, but of a cart-horse worth about £50. It was, however, his bit of duty as Jock understood it; all he had to give was his life, and he gave it without hesitation and without fear. XX.--NO RELEVANT OBJECTION NEXT to the election of a minister nothing stirred the parish of Thomgreen like an election of elders, and it may be truthfully said that the people were far more concerned about the men whom they appointed to this sacred office than about the man whom they sent to represent them in Parliament. The people had also a keen sense of the kind of man who was fit to be an elder, and there was many a farmer whom they would have cheerfully elected to any board, and in whose hands they would have trusted any amount of money, but whom they would never have dreamt of making an elder. Persons who were by no means careful about their own life, and one would not have supposed had any great concern about the character of the officers of the Christian Church, had yet a fixed idea, and a very sound one, about the qualifications for an elder; and if one of themselves had been proposed would have regarded the idea as an insult, not to them but to the Church. “Me an elder,” he would have said; “for ony sake be quiet; there maun be nae jokin' on sich subjects. When you and me are made elders the kirk had better be closed.” For the word elder was synonymous in Thorngreen, and, indeed, in every right-thinking parish, not only with morality and integrity, but with gravity and spirituality.