Thrums is the name I give here to the handful of houses jumbled¹ together in a cup, which is the town nearest the school-house. Until twenty years ago its every other room, earthen-floored and showing the rafters overhead, had a hand-loom, and hundreds of weavers² lived and died Thoreaus “ben the hoose” without knowing it. In those days the cup overflowed⁵ and left several houses on the top of the hill, where their cold skeletons still stand. The road that climbs from the square, which is Thrums' heart, to the north is so steep and straight, that in a sharp frost children hunker at the top and are blown down with a roar and a rush on rails of ice. At such times, when viewed from the cemetery⁶ where the traveller from the school-house gets his first glimpse of the little town. Thrums is but two church-steeples and a dozen red-stone patches standing⁷ out of a snow-heap. One of the steeples belongs to the new Free Kirk, and the other to the parish church, both of which the first Auld⁸ Licht minister I knew ran past when he had not time to avoid them by taking a back wynd. He was but a pocket edition of a man, who grew two inches after he was called; but he was so full of the cure of souls, that he usually scudded⁹ to it with his coat-tails quarrelling behind him. His successor, whom I knew better, was a greater scholar, and said, “Let us see what this is in the original Greek,” as an ordinary man might invite a friend to dinner; but he never wrestled¹⁰ as Mr. Dishart, his successor, did with the pulpit cushions, nor flung himself at the pulpit door. Nor was he so “hard on the Book,” as Lang Tammas, the precentor, expressed it, meaning that he did not bang the Bible with his fist as much as might have been wished.