But neither brevity nor dilution makes any appeal to my friend Tom Birnie. "I am a member," he announces, as soon as a quorum has assembled at Sunday breakfast, "of the old Kirk of Scotland; and I propose to attend service at Doctor Chirnside’s at eleven o’clock. If any of you would care"—he addresses a suddenly presented perspective of immaculate partings, bald spots and permanent waves—"to accompany me, a conveyance will leave here at ten-forty." "Well, we can’t _all_ get in, that’s plain," chirps Miss Joan Dexter hopefully. (The table is laid for fourteen.) "The conveyance," continues the inexorable Tom, "holds twelve inside and four out, not counting the coachman." "It’s no good, Joan, old fruit," observes Master Roy Birnie. "We keep a pantechnicon!" "I suppose there’s not a Church of England service within reach?" asks little Mrs. Pomeroy, rather ingeniously. "One’s own Church makes an appeal to one which no other denomination cannot—can—adequately—doesn’t it?" she concludes, a little uncertain both of her syntax and her host. This is her first visit to Baronrigg. "Now she’s done for herself!" whispers Master Roy into my left ear. "I agree with you. There is an Episcopal Church—Scottish Episcopal, of course—at Fiddrie, three miles from here. I shall be happy to send you over there this evening at half-past six. This morning, I know, you will put up with our barbaric Northern rites!" replies Tom, with what he imagines to be an indulgent smile. "I like to see the Baronrigg pew full." And full it is. The longer I know Tom Birnie, the more I marvel that Diana Carrick married him. That sentiment is shared by a good many people, but on more abstract grounds than mine. Tom is a just and considerate landlord, an adequate sportsman, and a good specimen of that class by whose voluntary service this country gets most of its local government done, admirably, for nothing. But there are certain things against Tom. In the first place—to quote old Lady Christina Bethune, of Buckholm—"no one knows who the creature is, or where he came from." This implies nothing worse than that since Tom represents the first generation of Birnies born in this county, his forbears must have been born somewhere else. In other words—still quoting the same distinguished authority—"they never existed at all." As a matter of fact and common knowledge, Tom’s grandfather was a minister of the Kirk, somewhere in Perthshire, and his father an enormously successful member of the Scottish Bar, who bought the derelict little estate of Strawick, hard by here, and settled there in the late sixties with the presumptuous, but, I think, excusable, intention of founding a family. Naturally a family which has resided in our county for only forty-seven years can hardly be expected to have drifted, as yet, within the range of Lady Christina’s lorgnette.