The Provost's lady had scarcely composed herself from her agitation of merriment, to tell us what Miss Beeny had said, when the minister of the parish, the Rev. Dr. Glasham, attended by one of his elders, was shown into the room. It was clear to be seen they came to examine into the fact; at the same time, I saw plainly by the Rev. Gentleman's countenance, that he, as well as the whole community, had no very solemn ideas on the subject.

Dr. Glasham, of Chucky Stanes, was, indeed, no ordinary member of the Church of Scotland, both by reputation, and by what, of my own knowledge, I came to understand of him. He was such, merely as a man, that we seldom meet with. Not only was he unaffectedly pious in his sentiments, kindly and Christian at all points, and learned beyond many of his cloth; but he was of a jocose humour, and would carry a joke as far as any man I ever met with. Truly, he was a facetious brother; while austere towards every kind of dissoluteness, he was yet lenient in his judgment of many transactions, that men of less practical virtue would have treated with inexorable severity.

When he was first informed of the unspeakable outrage which it was alleged had actually been perpetrated, he thought there must be some exaggeration in the story; and he had come in gentle charity to try, however the case might be, to get the blaspheming tongue of the public stopped, by procuring the owning of a fault between Miss Beeny and me. To own a fault where no harm had been done, I was not likely to do; and, moreover, marriage was tied to the tail of it, to which I was determined, for less than the halter, never to assent.

After some general discourse, not of a very deep tint, which convinced me that all present were little disposed to countenance such a case as Miss Beeny pretended to set forth, Dr. Glasham proposed that she should he called in, and a precognition taken by him, before any charge should be laid before the magistrates.