She never called him _the master_, but always _the minister_.
She was a great favourite with my father, and he always behaved as a visitor in her house.
"Well, Kirsty," he said, after the first salutations were over, "have you any objection to turn schoolmistress ?" "I should make a poor hand at that," she answered, with a smile to me which showed she guessed what my father wanted.

"But if it were to teach Master Ranald there, I should like dearly to try what I could do." She never omitted the _Master_ to our names; Mrs.Mitchell by no chance prefixed it.

The natural manners of the Celt and Saxon are almost diametrically opposed in Scotland.

And had Kirsty's speech been in the coarse dialect of Mrs.Mitchell, I am confident my father would not have allowed her to teach me.

But Kirsty did not speak a word of Scotch, and although her English was a little broken and odd, being formed somewhat after Gaelic idioms, her tone was pure and her phrases were refined.