The Stickit Minister’s Wooing/The Gate of the Upper Garden

THE GATE OF THE UPPER GARDENFor the first six months that Gibby the Eel, otherwise the Reverend Gilbert Denholm, M.A., acted as "helper" to Dr. Joseph Girnigo in the parish of Rescobie, he was much pleased with himself. He laughed with his friend and classmate, Robertland, over the infatuation of the doctor's old maid daughter. The parish, reading the situation like a book, smiled broadly when the "helper" and Miss Jemima Girnigo were discerned on an opposite braeface, botanising together, or, with heads bent over some doubtful bloom, stood silhouetted against the sunlit green of some glade in Knockandrews wood.
During this period Gibby hugged himself upon his cleverness, but the time came when he began to have his doubts. What to him was a light-heart prank, an "Eel's trick," like his college jest of squirming secretly under class-room benches, was obviously no jest to this pale-eyed, sharp-featured maiden of one-and-forty.
Jemima Girnigo had never been truly young. Repressed and domineered over as a child, she had been suddenly promoted by her mother's death to the care of a household and the responsibility of training a bevy of younger brothers, all now out in the world and doin

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