The Standard BearerCrockett, S. R. (Samuel Rutherford)
History
The Standard Bearer
Crockett, S. R. (Samuel Rutherford)
Covenanters -- Fiction; Scotland -- History -- 17th century -- Fiction
Now it will greatly help those who read this chronicle to remember what
Quintin did on this occasion. I would not have cared a doit if he had
said, in the plain hearing of the class, that it was his brother Hob the
Lothian packman who had felled the Red Grant.
But would the lad betray his brother? No! He rather hung his head, and
said no more than that he heard the Red Grant was not seriously hurt.
For as he said afterwards, “I did not know what such a tribe of angry,
dirked Highlandmen might have done to you, Hob, if they had so much as
guessed it was no colleger’s fist which had taken Donald an inch beneath
the ear.
“Then,” said the Regent to Quintin, “my warrior of Wild Whigdom, you may
set to the learning of thirty psalms by heart in the original Hebrew.
And after you have said them without the book I will consider of your
letters of certification from this class.”
To which task my brother owes that familiarity with the Psalms of David
which has often served him to such noble purpose--both when, like
Boanerges, he thundered in the open fields to the listening peoples, and
when at closer range he spoke with his enemies in the gate. For thirty
would not suit this hungrisome Quintin of ours. He must needs learn the
whole hundred and fifty (is it not?) by rote before he went back to the
Regent.
“Which thirty psalms are ye prepared to recite?” queried the Professor
under the bush of his eyebrows.
“Any thirty!” answered brave Quintin, unabashed, yet noways uplifted.
* * * * *
Now the rest of my brother’s college life may be told in a word. I know
that he had written many chapters upon his struggles and
heart-questionings as to duty and guidance at that time. But whether he
destroyed them himself, or whether they exist in some undiscovered
repository, certain it is that the next portion of his autobiography
which has come into my hands deals with the time of his settlement in
the parish of Balmaghie, where he was to endure so many strange things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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