Jean’s dress had lost the picturesqueness which would have distinguished her grand-mother’s, but it was good of its kind--if somewhat severe in the tone and cut, and only remarkable as worn by Jean Kinloch. But Jean carried a bible which was no modern, cheaply printed, cheaply bound Bible Society’s volume: it was a valuable hereditary possession in a couple of small volumes bound in fine and lasting russian leather with flaps fastened by burnished silver clasps, while there was dim gold on the edges of the yellow leaves with their clear delicate print. A bible not unlike it is to be seen among the relics of Burns. It was given by the peasant farmer’s son to his Highland Mary--the girl whom he was to immortalise by two out of the most exquisite love-laments in any language--in that autumn when she came down and ‘shore’ the harvest with him among the ‘banks and braes and streams around The Castle o’ Montgomery.’ But Jean Kinloch’s bible was not a love-gift, on which, as it was held in the man’s left hand over a running stream, the woman and her lover clasped hands, and swore in the sight of their God to be faithful to death. Such bibles with the broken sixpences of a more worldly form of troth-plight were already gone out of fashion. This book possessed a different distinction, having been Jean’s mother’s kirking bible. Jean was bound on a long and fatiguing walk even for her youth and vigour, so that she had got up by daybreak, before even the minister, the earliest riser in the manse, had replaced the Greek and Hebrew studies of ordinary days, by the preparatory devotions peculiar to the sabbath day, while the rest of the household lay in silent unconsciousness. She had set out ere the raw mist had cleared away, in order to reach Logan Kirk in time for the forenoon ‘diet of worship.’ The only sufficient warrant in Jean’s eyes for such a distant expedition on that ‘sawbath day’ which she had been taught to reverence so intensely, would have been an exceptional privilege of sitting down at one of the sacred ‘tables,’ after they had been jealously ‘fenced.’ Then she would have heard it ‘served’ by some grand minister, a very patriarch and prophet in one, a man famed in Jean’s circle for lofty austere piety, impassioned zeal, and immense experience with learning to match, though the latter quality was held in small account compared to the recommendations which went before it. Such a minister was a fit successor to ‘Holy Renwick’ and ‘gude Cargill’ and the other heroes and martyrs who endured to the end--till they were shot down in peat bogs, or mounted steadfastly and triumphantly the long ladder to the high gallows in the Grass Market of Edinburgh.