As he was walking away, questioning with himself, he
heard a voice in the air above him. It came from the lips of Thomas
Crann, who, although stooping from asthma and rheumatism, still rose
nearly a foot above the head of Mr Cupples.
"I was glaid to see ye at oor kirk, sir," said Thomas.
"What for that?" returned the librarian, who always repelled first
approaches, in which he was only like Thomas himself, and many other
worthy people, both Scotch and English.
"A stranger sud aye be welcomed to onybody's hoose."
"I didna ken it was your hoose."
"Ow na. It's no my hoose. It's the Lord's hoose. But a smile frae the
servan'-lass that opens the door's something till a man that gangs to
ony hoose for the first time, ye ken," returned Thomas, who, like many
men of rough address, was instantly put upon his good behaviour by the
exhibition of like roughness in another.
This answer disarmed Cupples. He looked up into Thomas's face, and saw
first a massive chin; then a firmly closed mouth; then a nose, straight
as a Greek's, but bulky and of a rough texture; then two keen grey
eyes, and lastly a big square forehead supported by the two pedestals
of high cheek bones???-the whole looking as if it had been hewn out of
his professional granite, or rather as if the look of the granite had
passed into the face that was so constantly bent over it fashioning the
stubborn substance to the yet more stubborn human will.
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