'You're a saft feckless tawpie, Sophia Sangster!' she enunciated with much emphasis, as she and her daughter were carried along in the stream of the procession. 'It seems to me sometimes that you have no more sense than a sookin' turkey!' Mrs. Sangster rather prided herself on her English, which she considered equal to that of any body on her side of London or Inverness. These were the two seats of perfect speech she considered; but failing them Auchlippie could hold its own against Edinburgh, St. Andrews, or anywhere else, and was decidedly a better model than her son Peter since he had adopted a Lancashire brogue. Nevertheless when she became 'excited' (_i.e_. angry), she admitted that she had to fall back on the pith and vigour of her native Doric with its unlimited capacity for picturesque vituperation. 'It's not from me you take your fushionless gates! That comes o' the donnart Sangster bluid in you, I'm thinking. But what possessed you to take up publicly like yon with Mary Brown, when you know I want you to steer clear of her just now? When the Presbytery has taken the matter up, it will be proper enough to bestow patronage and show sympathy for the poor girl; but meanwhile we have a testimony to bear, and it will not do to countenance evil doers or their families.' 'Mamma, I don't know what you are talking about.' 'Of course not. It's no subject for a young girl to know anything about; but you must not think in your ignorance to set yourself above the advice and opinion of your mother, who knows all about it.' Sophia said no more. To speak was but to stir the fire of her mother's wrath. She held her peace, and left the flame to burn itself out, or smother in its own smoke and ashes. She simply did not attend, and when her mother, stopping for breath, turned to survey, as it were, the field of battle, or at least to view the result of her onslaught as depicted in the girl's face, she was smiling to a bare-footed urchin who trotted by her side, Stephen Boague's youngest, who had taken a fancy to the gay apparel of Mrs. Sangster, and still kept it in view. 'Let that de'il's buckie alone, Sophia Sangster, and attend to me! It has been pulling the fringes of my shawl for the past two hours, and made it smell of peat-reek and moss-water so that I shall never be able to put it on again.' The meeting was held in the field adjoining the excavation made for the church's foundation. Mr. Sangster was in the chair and supported on either hand by a minister, and there were chairs in front for Mrs. Sangster, her daughter, and Miss Brown, to which the matron, somewhat mollified by this observance, was ushered, when she very quickly appropriated the remaining seat for her shawl, so that there might be no vacant place for any one else. She might have spared herself the trouble. Mary was not in the crowd, and if she had been, would not have desired to sit beside her.