The Standard Bearer

And now, the rubicon being passed, there shone a quick and alert gladness upon her face. Her feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground. The mood of sedateness had passed away, an...

Lord! Lord! Was there ever a more bungled affair--a more humiliating confession. Our poor Quintin--great as he was at the preaching, an apostle indeed, none in broad Scotland to...

It was the prime of the morning when I set out for Earlstoun. My mother called after me to mind my manners, as if I had still been but a herdboy summoned into the presence of th...

This is what I, Quintin MacClellan, saw on the grassy summit of the Bennan--a thing which, being seen and overpast in an hour, changed all my life, and so in time by the grace o...

Wending our way through the tangle of brown morass and grey boulder, we arrived, the little maid and I, at the extremity of the spur which looks towards the north. Immediately b...

It was while we continued to sojourn in Edinburgh for the protection of the Convention that first I began to turn my mind to the stated ministry of the Kirk, for I saw well that...

There was little more to do. The scanty stock of the glebe was, by Hob’s intervention, sold in part to Nathan Gemmell, of Drumglass, and the remainder driven along the Kenside b...

Yet more grimly bitter than the day of December the thirtieth fell the night. I wandered by the bank of the river, where the sedges rustled lonely and dry by the marge, whisperi...

I met my lass Jonita that night by the sheep-fold on the hill. It was not yet sundown, but the spaces of the heavens had slowly grown large and vague. The wind also had graduall...

It was not long after this that I found myself, almost against my will, skirting the side of the long Loch of Ken, on the road to the Great House of Earlstoun.

I passed by the little Clachan of St. John’s Town of Dalry, leaving it stretching away up the braeface on my right hand. A little way beyond the kirk I struck into the fringing...

Now throughout all the parish, aye, and throughout all Galloway there arose infinite noise and bruit of this thing. Specially was there the buzz of anger in the hill parishes, w...

So I was settled in my parish, which was a good one as times went. The manse had recently been put in order. It was a pleasant stone house which sat in the bieldy hollow beneath...

Dark was the day, darker the night. The matters which had sundered me from the Presbytery mended not--nor, indeed, was it possible to mend them, seeing that they and I served di...

It was growing dusk when Mary Gordon and I came to the edge of the lake. Now, Loch Ken, though a narrow and winding piece of water, and more the extension of the river than, as...

The crown had indeed been set upon the work. The business, as said the Right Reverend Presbytery, was finished, and with well-satisfied hearts the brethren went back to their ma...

So the service being ended for the day, I walked quietly over to Drumglass with Jean and her father. There I found a house well furnished, oxen and kine knee-deep in water, mead...

And when we arrived, lo! before the little white farm there was a great muster. My Lord Kenmure himself rode over to review us. For the Committee of Estates drawn together by th...

The years which took me, Quintin MacClellan, from the boyishness of thirteen to eighteen and manhood were eventful ones for Scotland. The second Charles had died just when the b...

For just then I became aware of a quickly growing light behind the eastern hills. It was the moon rising. I had not thought of this, and for a moment I was disconcerted. I knew...

We had been steadily approaching the farm-steading of Drumglass, where it sits pleasantly under the hill looking down over the water-meadows, the while Nathan Gemmell told me hi...

Now though at first I was grievously astonished that the daughter of Alexander Gordon and his wife Janet Hamilton should so speak, yet when I come to consider further of the mat...

Within the kirk of Balmaghie there spread from gable to gable a dim sea of faces, men standing in corners, men holding by windows, men peering in at the low doorway, while the w...

But it was not the will of God that I should warn my mother that day; for even as I ran, threading my way among the scattered boulders and whin bushes of the lower slopes, I cam...

Yet not all barren or desolate, for here and there among the grey granite peeped forth the bloom of the young heather, making a livelier purple amid the burnt brown of the short...

The next day was the 30th of December, a day of bitter frost, so that the Dee froze over, and the way which had been broken for the boats to ferry the Presbytery across from the...

It was a day of high summer when the anger of mine enemies drew finally to a head, and that within mine own land of Balmaghie. The Presbytery were in the habit of meeting at a p...

As gently as I could I withdrew from her grasp, and with a pocket Bible in my hand (that little one in red leather of the King’s printers which I always carried about with me),...

For, as I turned me about to go back the way I came, there by the copse side, where the broom grew highest, stood Jean Gemmell, with a face suddenly drawn thin, grey-white and w...

Now when after all the call came for me to be placed minister of the parish, and I was placed there with the solemn laying on of the hands of the Presbytery, I thought in my fol...

The smoke of the gun curled slowly and reluctantly out of the narrow windows, and through the garret opening I heard a hurried rush of feet beneath me on the stairs, light and q...

I had been well-nigh a year about the great house of Girthon as family chaplain to the laird, when there came a call to accept the ministry of the Gospel among the people of Bal...

Men who know the strange history of the later life of me, Quintin MacClellan, may wonder that the present narrative discovers so little concerning my changes of opinion and stre...

The fateful Sabbath came--a day of infinite stillness, so that from beside the tombs of the martyr Hallidays in the kirkyard of Balmaghie you could hear the sheep bleating on th...

It was toward the mellow end of August that there came a sough of things terrible wafted down the fair glen of the Kens, a sough which neither lost in volume nor in bitterness w...

But as for my brother, concerning whom was all this pother, he took no hand at all in the matter. If the people wished him to abide with them, they must maintain him there. Cont...

It seemed as if there was no goodness on the earth, no use in my work, no right or excellency in the battle I had fought and the sacrifice I had made. Ought I not even now to gi...

As all may understand, it was with bowed head and crushed heart that I bent my steps towards the grey tower, sitting so stilly among the leafage of the wood above the water.

But whilst I had been going about my work the enemies had not been idle. They had deposed me from the ministry. They could not depose me from the hearts of a willing and loyal p...