1. Free Kirk Manse, house of a minister of the Free Church. The Free Church seceded from the Church of Scotland in 1843 and although the main bodies of the two churches reunitied in the 1920s, a segment of the Free Church continued its independent existence — sometimes called the ‘Wee Free Church’. The Free Church is committed to the more rigorous elements of the Calvinist theology on which the Church of Scotland was founded.
2. B.S.M., Battery Sergeant Major.
3. Meditations among the Tombs, by the Rev. James Hervey, A.M., at one time Rector of Weston Favell, Northamptonshire, written in 1746. The book asserts the fundamentally Calvinistic basis of the 39 articles of the Church of England, and its harmony with the fundamental truths of all Protestant religions.
4. I’m like old Wordsworth… Highland Lass, in Wordsworth’s poem ‘The solitary reaper’, the speaker encounters an isolated young woman singing a Gaelic song, whose beauty he can respond to despite not uderstanding her language.
5. Episcopalian… C. of E., in Scotland, Anglicans are referred to by the term that means rule by bishops, the element most opposed by early presbyterianism.
6. trouble and strife, wife (Cockney rhyming slang).
7. Goering and that lad Rommel, Hermann Goering was the close associate of German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and head of the Luftwaffe (the German Air Force). Rommel was Hitler’s battle-winning general in North Africa until defeated by the Allies in 1943.