“For God’s sake, minister,” continued the soutar, “gien ye hae ony sic thing upo yer min’, hurry and oot wi’ ’t! I dinna say _to me_, but to somebody—to onybody! Mak a clean breist o’ ’t, afore the Adversary has ye again by the thrapple!” But here started awake in the minister the pride of superiority in station and learning: a shoemaker, from whom he had just ordered a pair of boots, to take such a liberty, who ought naturally to have regarded him as necessarily spotless! He drew himself up to his lanky height, and made reply— “I am not aware, Mr. MacLear, that I have given you any pretext for addressing me in such terms! I told you, indeed, that I was putting a case, a very possible one, it is true, but not the less a merely imaginary one! You have shown me how unsafe it is to enter into an argument on any supposed case with one of limited education! It is my own fault, however; and I beg your pardon for having thoughtlessly led you into such a pitfall!—Good morning!” As the door closed behind the parson, he began to felicitate himself on having so happily turned aside the course of a conversation whose dangerous drift he seemed now first to recognize; but he little thought how much he had already conveyed to the wide-eyed observation of one well schooled in the symptoms of human unrest. “I must set a better watch over my thoughts lest they betray me!” he reflected; thus resolving to conceal himself yet more carefully from the one man in the place who would have cut for him the snare of the fowler. “I was ower hasty wi’ ’im!” concluded the soutar on his part. “But I think the truth has some grup o’ ’im. His conscience is waukin up, I fancy, and growlin a bit; and whaur that tyke has ance taen haud, he’s no ready to lowsen or lat gang! We maun jist lie quaiet a bit, and see! His hoor ’ill come!” The minister being one who turned pale when angry, walked home with a face of such corpse-like whiteness, that a woman who met him said to herself, “What can ail the minister, bonny laad! He’s luikin as scared as a corp! I doobt that fule body the soutar’s been angerin him wi’ his havers!”