Читать книгу Scottish Reminiscences онлайн
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During the long incumbency of the minister’s father, no built place of worship existed in Strathaird. The little chapel of the early Celtic Church, of which the memory is preserved in the name Kilmaree, had long disappeared, and the clergyman used to preach from a recess in the basalt crags, with a grassy slope in front on which his congregation sat to hear him. My host, however, in the early years of his tenancy of the parish, had succeeded in getting a small church erected wherein his people could be sheltered in bad weather. I can recollect one of these Sundays when the weather was absolutely perfect—a cloudless blue sky, the sea smooth as a mirror, and the air suffused with the calm peacefulness which seems so appropriate to a Sabbath. We were a large but singularly quiet party, as we steered for the little bay of Kilmaree, each wrapped up in the thoughts which the day or the scene suggested. As we approached our landing place, we were startled by two gun-shots in rapid succession on the hillside above us. The sound would under any circumstances have intruded somewhat harshly into the quiet of the landscape. But it was Sunday, and such a thing as shooting on the Lord’s day had never been heard of in Strath. An Englishman had rented the ground for the season, and he and his wife were now out with their guns. The surprise and horror with which this conduct was viewed by the minister and his family soon found an echo through the length and breadth of the parish.