



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Katherine Ward, and the
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The Little Minister

_By_

J. M. BARRIE

Maude Adams Edition


  NEW YORK
  R. H. RUSSELL: Publisher
  1898

  Copyright 1891 and 1895
  By UNITED STATES BOOK CO.

  Copyright 1898
  By ROBERT HOWARD RUSSELL




CONTENTS

                                                                  PAGE
        I. The Love-Light.                                           1
       II. Runs Alongside the Making of a Minister.                  7
      III. The Night-Watchers.                                      17
       IV. First Coming of the Egyptian Woman.                      30
        V. A Warlike Chapter, Culminating in the Flouting of the
               Minister by the Woman.                               42
       VI. In Which the Soldiers Meet the Amazons of Thrums.        50
      VII. Has the Folly of Looking into a Woman's Eyes by way
               of Text.                                             62
     VIII. 3 A.M.--Monstrous Audacity of the Woman.                 69
       IX. The Woman Considered in Absence--Adventures of a
               Military Cloak.                                      79
        X. First Sermon Against Women.                              89
       XI. Tells in a Whisper of Man's Fall During the Curling
               Season.                                             100
      XII. Tragedy of a Mud House.                                 110
     XIII. Second Coming of the Egyptian Woman.                    117
      XIV. The Minister Dances to the Woman's Piping.              125
       XV. The Minister Bewitched--Second Sermon against Women.    135
      XVI. Continued Misbehaviour of the Egyptian Woman.           143
     XVII. Intrusion of Haggart into These Pages against the
               Author's Wish.                                      151
    XVIII. Caddam--Love Leading to a Rupture.                      161
      XIX. Circumstances Leading to the First Sermon in Approval
               of Women.                                           169
       XX. End of the State of Indecision.                         177
      XXI. Night--Margaret--Flashing of a Lantern.                 186
     XXII. Lovers.                                                 196
    XXIII. Contains a Birth, Which is Sufficient for One
               Chapter.                                            205
     XXIV. The New World, and the Woman Who May Not Dwell
               Therein.                                            211
      XXV. Beginning of the Twenty-Four Hours.                     217
     XXVI. Scene at the Spittal.                                   225
    XXVII. First Journey of the Dominie to Thrums During the
               Twenty-Four Hours.                                  232
   XXVIII. The Hill before Darkness Fell--Scene of the Impending
               Catastrophe.                                        237
     XXIX. Story of the Egyptian.                                  244
      XXX. The Meeting for Rain.                                   252
     XXXI. Various Bodies Converging on the Hill.                  259
    XXXII. Leading Swiftly to the Appalling Marriage.              268
   XXXIII. While the Ten O'Clock Bell Was Ringing.                 274
    XXXIV. The Great Rain.                                         281
     XXXV. The Glen at Break of Day.                               285
    XXXVI. Story of the Dominie.                                   299
   XXXVII. Second Journey of the Dominie to Thrums During the
               Twenty-Four Hours.                                  308
  XXXVIII. Thrums during the Twenty-Four Hours--Defence of the
               Manse.                                              315
    XXXIX. How Babbie Spent the Night of August Fourth.            324
       XL. Babbie and Margaret--Defence of the Manse Continued.    330
      XLI. Rintoul and Babbie--Breakdown of the Defence of the
               Manse.                                              337
     XLII. Margaret, the Precentor, and God Between.               345
    XLIII. Rain--Mist--The Jaws.                                   353
     XLIV. End of the Twenty-Four Hours.                           363
      XLV. Talk of a Little Maid Since Grown Tall.                 369


[Illustration: "I'LL GI'E YOU MY RABBIT," MICAH SAID, "IF YOU'LL GANG
AWA'."--PAGE 215.]




NOTE


The illustrations in this book have been made especially for this
edition of The Little Minister by arrangement with Mr. Charles
Frohman, through whose courtesy they are here reproduced. Many of them
were drawn by C. Allen Gilbert, while others are from photographs
which appear here for the first time.




Chapter One.

THE LOVE-LIGHT.


Long ago, in the days when our caged blackbirds never saw a king's
soldier without whistling impudently, "Come ower the water to
Charlie," a minister of Thrums was to be married, but something
happened, and he remained a bachelor. Then, when he was old, he passed
in our square the lady who was to have been his wife, and her hair was
white, but she, too, was still unmarried. The meeting had only one
witness, a weaver, and he said solemnly afterwards, "They didna speak,
but they just gave one another a look, and I saw the love-light in
their een." No more is remembered of these two, no being now living
ever saw them, but the poetry that was in the soul of a battered
weaver makes them human to us for ever.

It is of another minister I am to tell, but only to those who know
that light when they see it. I am not bidding good-bye to many
readers, for though it is true that some men, of whom Lord Rintoul was
one, live to an old age without knowing love, few of us can have met
them, and of women so incomplete I never heard.

Gavin Dishart was barely twenty-one when he and his mother came to
Thrums, light-hearted like the traveller who knows not what awaits him
at the bend of the road. It was the time of year when the ground is
carpeted beneath the firs with brown needles, when split-nuts patter
all day from the beech, and children lay yellow corn on the dominie's
desk to remind him that now they are needed in the fields. The day was
so silent that carts could be heard rumbling a mile away. All Thrums
was out in its wynds and closes--a few of the weavers still in
knee-breeches--to look at the new Auld Licht minister. I was there
too, the dominie of Glen Quharity, which is four miles from Thrums;
and heavy was my heart as I stood afar off so that Gavin's mother
might not have the pain of seeing me. I was the only one in the crowd
who looked at her more than at her son.

Eighteen years had passed since we parted. Already her hair had lost
the brightness of its youth, and she seemed to me smaller and more
fragile; and the face that I loved when I was a hobbledehoy, and loved
when I looked once more upon it in Thrums, and always shall love till
I die, was soft and worn. Margaret was an old woman, and she was only
forty-three; and I am the man who made her old. As Gavin put his eager
boyish face out at the carriage window, many saw that he was holding
her hand, but none could be glad at the sight as the dominie was glad,
looking on at a happiness in which he dared not mingle. Margaret was
crying because she was so proud of her boy. Women do that. Poor sons
to be proud of, good mothers, but I would not have you dry those
tears.

[Illustration: A STREET IN THRUMS.]

When the little minister looked out at the carriage window, many of
the people drew back humbly, but a little boy in a red frock with
black spots pressed forward and offered him a sticky parly, which
Gavin accepted, though not without a tremor, for children were more
terrible to him then than bearded men. The boy's mother, trying not to
look elated, bore him away, but her face said that he was made for
life. With this little incident Gavin's career in Thrums began. I
remembered it suddenly the other day when wading across the wynd where
it took place. Many scenes in the little minister's life come back to
me in this way. The first time I ever thought of writing his love
story as an old man's gift to a little maid since grown tall, was one
night while I sat alone in the school-house; on my knees a fiddle that
has been my only living companion since I sold my hens. My mind had
drifted back to the first time I saw Gavin and the Egyptian together,
and what set it wandering to that midnight meeting was my garden gate
shaking in the wind. At a gate on the hill I had first encountered
these two. It rattled in his hand, and I looked up and saw them, and
neither knew why I had such cause to start at the sight. Then the gate
swung to. It had just such a click as mine.

These two figures on the hill are more real to me than things that
happened yesterday, but I do not know that I can make them live to
others. A ghost-show used to come yearly to Thrums on the merry Muckle
Friday, in which the illusion was contrived by hanging a glass between
the onlookers and the stage. I cannot deny that the comings and goings
of the ghost were highly diverting, yet the farmer of T'nowhead only
laughed because he had paid his money at the hole in the door like the
rest of us. T'nowhead sat at the end of a form where he saw round the
glass and so saw no ghost. I fear my public may be in the same
predicament. I see the little minister as he was at one-and-twenty,
and the little girl to whom this story is to belong sees him, though
the things I have to tell happened before she came into the world. But
there are reasons why she should see; and I do not know that I can
provide the glass for others. If they see round it, they will neither
laugh nor cry with Gavin and Babbie.

When Gavin came to Thrums he was as I am now, for the pages lay before
him on which he was to write his life. Yet he was not quite as I am.
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story,
and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the
volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. But the biographer sees
the last chapter while he is still at the first, and I have only to
write over with ink what Gavin has written in pencil.

How often is it a phantom woman who draws the man from the way he
meant to go? So was man created, to hunger for the ideal that is above
himself, until one day there is magic in the air, and the eyes of a
girl rest upon him. He does not know that it is he himself who crowned
her, and if the girl is as pure as he, their love is the one form of
idolatry that is not quite ignoble. It is the joining of two souls on
their way to God. But if the woman be bad, the test of the man is when
he wakens from his dream. The nobler his ideal