"Favour is vain and the eye of Him that sitteth in the heavens regardeth it not," she was wont to say, "and if Rob and Thomas and Ebenezer come to an ill end, mother, you will only have yourself to thank for it!" "Nonsense, Jen," said her mother, "if you are prevented by your infirmities from talkin' sense, at least do hold your tongue. Doctor Gillespie is a Kirkman and a Moderate, but he is--well, he is the Doctor, and never a word has been said against him for forty year, walk and conversation both as becometh the Gospel----" "Aye, but _is_ it the Gospel?" cried Jen, snipping out her words as with scissors; "that's the question." "When I require you, Janet Lyon, to decide for your mother what is Gospel and what is not, I'll let ye ken," said my grandmother, "and if I have accepted a responsibility from the Most High for these children, I will do my best to render an account of my stewardship at the Great White Throne. In the meantime, _you_ have no more right to task me for it, than--than--Boyd Connoway!" "There," cried Jen, slapping down the last dish which she had been drying while her mother washed, "I declare, mother, I might just as well not have a tongue at all. Whatever I say you are on my back. And as if snubbing me were not enough, down you must come on me with the Great White Throne!" Her aggrieved voice made my grandmother laugh. "Well-a-well!" she said, in her richly comfortable voice of a mother of consolation, "you are of the tribe of Marthas, Jen, and you certainly work hard enough for everybody to give your tongue a right to a little trot now and then. You will have all the blessings, daughter Janet--except that of the peacemaker. For it's in you to set folk by the ears and you really can't help it. Though who you took it from is more than I can imagine, with a mother as mild as milk and a father----" "Well, what about the father--speak of the--um-um--father and he will appear, I suppose!" It was my grandfather who had come in, his face bronzed with the sun and a friendly shaving tucked underneath his coat collar at the back, witnessing that some one of his sons, in the labours of the pirn-mill, had not remembered the first commandment with promise. His wife removed it with a smile, and said, "I'll wager ye that was yon rascal Rob. He is always at his tricks!" "Well, what were you saying about me, old wife?" said grandfather, looking at his wife with the quiet fondness that comes of half-a-century of companionship. "Only that Jen there had a will-o'-the-wisp of a temper and that I knew not how she got it, for you only go about pouring oil upon the waters!" "As to that, you know best, guidwife," he answered, smiling, "but I think I have heard of a wife up about the Heathknowes, who in some measure possesses the power of her unruly member. It is possible that Jen there may have picked up a thorn or two from that side!" William Lyon caught his daughter's ear.