Then follows a pathetic picture of one such widow, trembling and fainting
for hunger, obliged, on her way to the well for a can of water, her only
drink, to sit down on a 'knowe' and say a prayer.

'Yet she's decently, yea, tidily dressed, poor creature! in sair worn
widow's clothes, a single suit for Saturday and Sunday; her hair,
untimely gray, is neatly braided under her crape cap; and sometimes,
when all is still and solitary in the fields, and all labour has
disappeared into the house, you may see her stealing by herself, or
leading one wee orphan by the hand, with another at her breast, to the
kirkyard, where the love of her youth and the husband of her prime is
buried.

'Yet,' says the Shepherd, 'he was a brute, a ruffian, a monster. When
drunk, how he raged and cursed and swore! Often did she dread that,
in his fits of inhuman passion, he would have murdered the baby at her
breast; for she had seen him dash their only little boy, a child of
eight years old, on the floor, till the blood gushed from his ears;
and then the madman threw himself down on the body, and howled for the
gallows. Limmers haunted his door, and he theirs; and it was hers to
lie, not sleep, in a cold, forsaken bed, once the bed of peace,
affection, and perfect happiness. Often he struck her; and once when
she was pregnant with that very orphan now smiling on her breast,
reaching out his wee fingers to touch the flowers on his father's
grave. . . .

'But she tries to smile among the neighbours, and speaks of her boy's
likeness to its father; nor, when the conversation turns on bygone
times, does she fear to let his name escape her white lips, "My