A SCOTTISH SABBATH.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17629, 5 December 1922, Page 3

A SCOTTISH SABBATH.

From the verandah of the shooting lodge I look out on a strangely still and silent world, alight with the early October sun (writes Lady Doughty in a London paper). All work, all labour, and all life have come to a standstill. Time seems to pause liko the golden eagle that now hovers motionless over the mountain glen. The crofters are indoors. So, too, are the stalkers and the folk who dwell in the wee stone houses.

The cattle seem painted into the hillBides. The final effect of melancholy stillness is given by the frowning mountains that close in the view on every side. Theirs is an eternal Sabbath. Yet this is called the Devil's Loch, for it narrows .away in one direction through so shadowy and darksome a passage that gloom and foreboding seem per. petually to hover over its ominous waters. Even to-day the radiance of the sky touches it not. What a setting for a rigid Scottish Sabbath! Service could be held on the banks with perfect propriety, with Nature providing the kirk, as it miglit provide temple, altar, and pulpit, with the sun, if needs be, for the sanctuary lamp, in a city's nobler ritual.

Instead, to-day's service will-be held in a wee stone school, plain, common, poor. But it represents the established Church of Scotland in this Highland village. And a stern-faced young missioner—with the expression of an old-time Covenanter —who is in turn stalker, keeper, fisherman, crofter, will take a good, stout text from the Great Book, and tug earnestly at its inner meaning and message for the best part of an hour. And without music or melody the worshippers will raise their voices in hymn and paraphrase for another hour. Discordant, harsh, monotonous, but for sincerity and devotion where will you find choristers like them? And, afterwards, as from_ a funeral rite the procession of ghillies and crofters and the few little children the village boasts will file out in melancholy fashion and wend its way homewards with very little speech and with a cloominess that weighs even on these barefooted little Presbyterians. And the afternoon will wear slowly on and the soft October sky will merge into argosies of burnished gold and wine-stained fantasies, and again into nebulous purple domes and temples until the light of the Holy Sabbath goes out and dusk falls.