who saw him so stern an hour ago does not understand why he
wrestles so long in prayer to-night, or why when he rises from his
knees he presses her to him with unwonted tenderness. Or he is in
this chair repeating to her his favourite poem, 'The Cameronian's
Dream,' and at the first lines so solemnly uttered,


'In a dream of the night I was wafted away,'


she screams with excitement, just as I screamed long afterwards
when she repeated them in his voice to me. Or I watch, as from a
window, while she sets off through the long parks to the distant
place where he is at work, in her hand a flagon which contains his
dinner. She is singing to herself and gleefully swinging the
flagon, she jumps the burn and proudly measures the jump with her
eye, but she never dallies unless she meets a baby, for she was so
fond of babies that she must hug each one she met, but while she
hugged them she also noted how their robes were cut, and afterwards
made paper patterns, which she concealed jealously, and in the
fulness of time her first robe for her eldest born was fashioned
from one of these patterns, made when she was in her twelfth year.

She was eight when her mother's death made her mistress of the
house and mother to her little brother, and from that time she
scrubbed and mended and baked and sewed, and argued with the
flesher about the quarter pound of beef and penny bone which
provided dinner for two days (but if you think that this was
poverty you don't know the meaning of the word), and she carried
the water from the pump, and had her washing-days and her ironings