The secret would doubtless have been wormed from him had not public attention been directed into another channel.

A prayer was certainly being offered up inside; but the voice was not the voice of the minister.
Lang Tammas told me afterwards that it had seemed at one time "very questionable" whether Little Rathie would be buried that day at all.
The incomprehensible absence of Mr.Dishart (afterwards satisfactorily explained) had raised the unexpected question of the legality of a burial in a case where the minister had not prayed over the "corp." There had even been an indulgence in hot words, and the Reverend Alexander Kewans, a "stickit minister," but not of the Auld Licht persuasion, had withdrawn in dudgeon on hearing Tammas asked to conduct the ceremony instead of himself.

But, great as Tammas was on religious questions, a pillar of the Auld Licht kirk, the Shorter Catechism at his finger-ends, a sad want of words at the very time when he needed them most, incapacitated him for prayer in public, and it was providential that Bowie proved himself a man of parts.

But Tammas tells me that the wright grossly abused his position, by praying at such length that Craigiebuckle fell asleep, and the mistress had to rise and hang the pot on the fire higher up the joist, lest its contents should burn before the return from the funeral.

Loury grew the sky, and more and more anxious the face of Little Rathie's daughter, and still Bowie prayed on.