This event soon led to a change among us. In the settling of Mr. Cayenne’s affairs in the Cotton-mill Company, it was found that he had left such a power of money, that it was needful to the concern, in order that they might settle with the doers under his testament, to take in other partners. By this Mr. Speckle came to be a resident in the parish, he having taken up a portion of Mr. Cayenne’s share. He likewise took a tack of the house and policy of Wheatrig. But although Mr. Speckle was a far more conversible man than his predecessor, and had a wonderful plausibility in business, the affairs of the company did not thrive in his hands. Some said this was owing to his having owre many irons in the fire; others, to the circumstances of the times: in my judgment, however, both helped; but the issue belongs to the events of another year. In the meanwhile, I should here note, that in the course of this current Ann. Dom. it pleased Heaven to visit me with a severe trial; the nature of which I will here record at length—the upshot I will make known hereafter. From the planting of inhabitants in the cotton-mill town of Cayenneville, or as the country folk, not used to used to such lang-nebbit words, now call it, Canaille, there had come in upon the parish various sectarians among the weavers, some of whom were not satisfied with the gospel as I preached it, and endeavoured to practise it in my walk and conversation; and they began to speak of building a kirk for themselves, and of getting a minster that would give them the gospel more to their own ignorant fancies. I was exceedingly wroth and disturbed when the thing was first mentioned to me; and I very earnestly, from the pulpit, next Lord’s day, lectured on the growth of newfangled doctrines; which, however, instead of having the wonted effect of my discourses, set up the theological weavers in a bleeze, and the very Monday following they named a committee, to raise money by subscription to build a meeting-house. This was the first overt act of insubordination, collectively manifested, in the parish; and it was conducted with all that crafty dexterity with which the infidel and jacobin spirit of the French Revolution had corrupted the honest simplicity of our good old hameward fashions. In the course of a very short time, the Canaille folk had raised a large sum, and seduced not a few of my people into their schism, by which they were enabled to set about building their kirk; the foundations thereof were not, however, laid till the following year, but their proceedings gave me a het heart, for they were like an open rebellion to my authority, and a contemptuous disregard of that religious allegiance which is due from the flock to the pastor. On Christmas-day the wind broke off the main arm of our Adam and Eve pear-tree; and I grieved for it more as a type and sign of the threatened partition, than on account of the damage, though the fruit was the juiciest in all the country side.