Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/391

376 is one of the regrets of my life that Dean Ramsay never heard of her. She might have furnished him with a chapter of good sayings. Ever since her prime antagonist found her way, in the lifetime of both, into later editions of The Reminiscences, on the strength of one such mot, I have longed for an opportunity of reparation to my friend’s memory, by recalling it for some recognition, however tardy and brief.

‘The wife ben the hoose,’ whoever she might be, was apt to be Kirsty’s embodiment of unrighteousness, and when, as in the case of this particular one, theology was the subject of dispute, it worked like madness in the brain.

A cross-grained, egotistical Pharisee I must admit Kirsty to have been, with a quaintly grumpy strain in her strait-lacedness essentially Scotch. Thus, she discriminated between the gratitude respectively due to the prompter and to the medium of a bountiful Christmas gift by saying, ‘It was a great deal from the Lord, but very little from her,’ i.e. the lady who had given it. That same kind friend was flatly extinguished on another occasion. Finding herself great enjoyment in the mild form of religious dissipation then known as ‘So-ir-ees’ (Soirées), she procured for Kirsty a ticket for one to be held by Kirsty’s own congregation. It was solemnly declined, on the ground that her ‘Prayer had long been “Turn Thou away my sight and eyes from viewing vanity.”&thinsp;’

The first Inverness Biblewoman had a startling reception. Kirsty submitted to the hearing of a chapter, then, laying down her whalebone-mounted spectacles on her big Bible, she said, ‘I have listened to you, now you must hear me. It’s no becoming for the like o’ you to be going aboot wi’ gum-floors in your bonnet.’ It was vain to plead that the