Such being the way to earn the esteem of Drowdle, it would have saved the telling of this story if, when young Dairsie Gordon received a call to be minister of the recently established mission church there, he had had any one to enlighten him on the subject.
He was so young that he was ashamed when any one asked him his age. They had called him "Joanna" at college, and sent him recipes along the desk for compelling a beard and moustache to grow under any conditions of soil and climate, however unfavourable.
Dairsie Gordon was very innocent, very learned, very ignorant, and—the only son of a well-to-do mother, who from a child had destined him for the ministry. The more was the pity!
As a child he was considered too delicate for the rough-and-tumble of school. He had a tutor, a mild-faced young man who seldom spoke above his breath, and never willingly walked more than a mile at a time, and then with a book in his hand and a flute in his tail pocket. Under his instruction, however, Dairsie became an excellent classic, and his verse gained the approval of Professor Jupiter Olympus when he went up to the University of Edinburgh, where Latin verse was a rare accomplishment in those days, and Greek ones as extinct as the dodo.
When her son went to college, Mrs. Gordon came up herself from the country to settle Dairsie in the house of a friend of her own, the widow of a deceased minister who had married an old maid late in life. This excellent lady possessed much experience of bazaars and a good working knowledge of tea-meetings, but she knew nothing of young men.
So, being placed in authority over Dairsie, she insisted that he should come straight back to Rose Crescent from his classes, take dinner in the middle of the day alone with his hostess, and then—as a treat—accompany her while she made a call or two on other clerical widows who had married late in life. Then she took him home to open his big lexicons and pore over crabbed constructions till supper-time. This feast consisted of plain bread and butter with the smallest morsel of cheese, because much cheese is not good for the digestion at night. A glass of milk accompanied these delicacies. It also was plain and blue, because the cream (a doubtful quantity at best) had been skimmed off it for Mrs. McSkirmish’s tea in the morning.