Meggie was always a rigid Presbyterian, and jealous of innovations in the Church; and, as she advanced in years, she became more rigid and more jealous. She is said to have regarded with no great reverence the young divines that filled up in the parishes around her the places of her departed contemporaries; and who too often substituted, as she alleged, the learning which they had acquired at college for a knowledge of the human heart and of the Bible. She could ill brook, too, any interference of the State in the concerns of the Kirk:--an Act of Parliament, when read from the pulpit, she deemed little better than blasphemy, and a King’s fast a day desecrated above every other. Her zeal in one unlucky instance brought her in contact with the civil law. Her favourite preacher was Mr. Porteous of Kilmuir, a divine of the old and deeply learned cast--eloquent and pious--not unacquainted with the book of nature, and thoroughly conversant with that of God. After hearing him deliver, in the church of Nigg, a powerful and impressive discourse, what was her horror and indignation when she saw him descending from the pulpit to read from the precentor’s desk some Proclamation or Act of Council! Had he been less a favourite, or anybody else than Mr. Porteous, she could have shut her ears and sat still; as it was, she sprang from her seat, and twitching the paper out of his hand, flung it to the floor and stamped upon it with her feet. She was apprehended and sent to the jail of Tain; but she found the jail a very comfortable sort of place, and, for the three days during which she was confined to it, she had for her visitors some of the very best people in the country; among the rest, Mr. Porteous himself, who had enough of the old Covenanter in him to feel that she had, perhaps, done only her duty, and that he had very possibly failed in his.