" Hob the laird was, indeed, essentially a decent man.
An elder of the Kirk, nobody had heard an oath upon his lips, save
perhaps thrice or so at the sheep-washing, since the chase of his
father's murderers. The figure he had shown on that eventful night
disappeared as if swallowed by a trap. He who had ecstatically dipped
his hand in the red blood, he who had ridden down Dickieson, became,
from that moment on, a stiff and rather graceless model of the rustic
proprieties; cannily profiting by the high war prices, and yearly
stowing away a little nest-egg in the bank against calamity; approved of
and sometimes consulted by the greater lairds for the massive and placid
sense of what he said, when he could be induced to say anything; and
particularly valued by the minister, Mr. Torrance, as a right-hand man
in the parish, and a model to parents. The transfiguration had been for
the moment only; some Barbarossa, some old Adam of our ancestors, sleeps
in all of us till the fit circumstance shall call it into action; and,
for as sober as he now seemed, Hob had given once for all the measure of
the devil that haunted him.
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