She had gone of her own accord to confess her fault, and was willing that her process of cleansing should be thorough before she received absolution.

When a companion in misfortune spoke of the greater leniency of Pitscowrie, Jean expressed her thankfulness that she was of Drumtochty.
"Nane o' yir loose wys for me--gie me a richt minister as dis his duty;" which showed that whatever might be her deflections in practice, Jean's ideas of morals were sound.
Preparations in the parish at large began two weeks before the Sacrament, when persons whose attendance had been, to say the least, irregular slipped in among the fathers without ostentation, and dropping into a conversation on the weather, continued, as it were, from last Sabbath, used it skilfully to offer an apology for past failures in church observance.
"It's keepit up wonderfu' through the week, for a' never like ower bricht mornin's," old Sandie Ferguson would remark casually, whose arrival, swallow-like, heralded the approach of the great occasion.
"The roads are graund the noo frae the heich (high glen); we 've hed an awfu' winter, neeburs, up oor wy--clean blockit up.

Them 'at lives ablow are michty favoured, wi' the kirk at their door." "It's maist extraordinar' hoo the seasons are changin'"-- Jamie Soutar could never resist Sandie's effrontery--"A' mind when Mairch saw the end o' the snow, an' noo winter is hangin' aboot in midsummer.

A'm expeckin' tae hear, in another five year, that the drifts last through the Sacrament in August.

It 'll be a sair trial for ye, Sandie, a wullin' kirkgoer--but ye 'll hae the less responsibility." "Millhole 's here, at ony rate, the day, an' we 're gled tae see him"-- for Drumsheugh's pride was to have a large Sacrament--and so Sandie would take his place at an angle to catch the Doctor's eye, and pay such rapt attention to the sermon that any one not knowing the circumstances might have supposed that he had just awaked from sleep.
Ploughmen who on other Sabbaths slept in the forenoon and visited their sweethearts the rest of the day, presented themselves for tokens on the Fast-day, and made the one elaborate toilette of the year on Saturday evening, when they shaved in turns before a scrap of glass hung outside the bothy door, and the foreman, skilled in the clipping of horses, cut their hair, utilising a porridge bowl with much ingenuity to secure a round cut.