St. Cuthbert’s

Tom, a Presbyterian minister of Irish stock with a small charge and an ambitious wife, travels to the Canadian town of New Jedboro to preach as a candidate for St. Cuthbert’s, a solidly Scottish kirk where his ancestry counts as a handicap. He gets the call, and the rest is his own account of the years that follow: a wary kirk session, a first round of parish visits, and a congregation holding a wealthy manufacturer with a secret, a pious profligate the session has shut out, and a shepherd lad just off the boat from Ettrick. Knowles, a Galt minister himself, wrote his people in the broad Scots they spoke and let the comedy and the pathos sit together. Readers took to it: five editions appeared between September and December 1905.