Meanwhile, in the Highlands and Islands, things were for a time going hard with the now disestablished Church. In some cases they had to preach 'where the snow was falling so heavily upon the people, that when it was over they could scarcely distinguish the congregation from the ground, except by their faces.' Baird of Cockburnspath had passed away in a room, 'a few inches above which were the slates of the roof, without any covering, and as white with hoar frost within as they were white with snow without. His very breath on the blankets was frozen as hard as the ice outside.' At Canonbie, Guthrie had passed Johnny Armstrong's Tower, and preached in wind and rain to a large congregation, 'old men, apparently near the grave, all wet and benumbed with the keen wind and cold rain.' In Cromarty, Miller's old friend Stewart was now preaching in the factory close, and there, in the summer of 1843, after a night of rain had swept the streets, his mind reverts to the congregations over Scotland in the open air--'I do begrudge the Moderates our snug, comfortable churches. I begrudge them my father's pew. It bears date 1741, and has been held by the family, through times of poverty and depression, a sort of memorial of better days, when we could afford getting a pew in the front gallery. But yonder it lies, empty within an empty church, a place for spiders to spin undisturbed, while all who should be occupying it take their places on stools and forms in the factory close.' The subtle mark of Scottish _gentility_ in the allusion to the pew will not fail to strike the reader. Let it not be said that it savours of 'gigmanity'--in that standing bugbear of Carlyle!