The passer-by, plodding along with head down and nose half sheltered from the cutting wind, took that member half out of the folds of his plaid to see what it was that was so bye-ordinary in the man he met. He did not sound like a common man going into the town on common business, nor look like it when the spectator turned to breathe the softer way of the wind for a moment and look after the stranger. Neither did Ronald feel like any one else on that wintry afternoon. He was a bridegroom, and the thrill of it was in all his veins. It was nearly dark when he came in sight of the lights, chiefly twinkling lights in windows, for there was no gas as yet to illuminate every little place as we have it now. In the Manse, with its larger windows, it was still light enough, and the soft yellow and pink of the frosty evening sky lent color, as well as light, to the calm of the parlor, facing toward the west, where Mr. Blythe sat alone. It was the minister’s musing time. Sometimes he had a doze; sometimes he sat by the fire, but with his chair turned to the sunset, and indulged in his own thoughts. These were confessedly, in many cases, his old stories, over which he would go from time to time, with a choke of a laugh in the stillness over this and that: perhaps there were moments in which his musings were more solemn, but of these history bears no record. The Manse parlor had no feature of beauty. It was a very humdrum room; but to the minister it was the abode of comfort and peace. He wanted nothing more than was to be found within its four walls; life was quite bounded to him by these walls, and I think he had no wish for any future that went beyond them: his _Scotsman_, which lasted him from one day to another, till the next (bi-weekly) number came in; his books, chiefly volumes of old history or Reminiscences, sometimes a Scots (occasionally printed Scott’s) novel--but that was a rare treat, and not to be calculated upon; a bout of story-telling now and then with another clerical brother or old elder whose memory stretched back to those cheerful, jovial, legendary days, where all the stories come from: these filled up existence happily enough for the old minister. His work was over, and I fear that perhaps he had never put very much of his heart into that, and he had his daughter to serve him “hand and foot,” as the maids said. He did not need even to take the trouble of finding his spectacles (which, like most other people, he was always losing) for himself. “Eelen, where’s my specs?” he said, without moving. Such was this old Scotch presbyter and sybarite, and though a paradise of black hair-cloth and mahogany does not much commend itself to us nowadays, I think Mr. Blythe would gladly have compounded for the deprivation of pearly gates and golden streets could he have secured the permanence of this.