and with a dear gesture she lifts up a torn page and kisses it.
'Poor thing,' she says to it, 'and you would have liked so fine to
be printed!' and she puts her hand over my desk to prevent my
writing more.

'In the last five minutes,' I begin, 'one can often do more than in
the first hour.'

'Many a time I've said it in my young days,' she says slowly.

'And proved it, too!' cries a voice from the door, the voice of one
who was prouder of her even than I; it is true, and yet almost
unbelievable, that any one could have been prouder of her than I.

'But those days are gone,' my mother says solemnly, 'gone to come
back no more. You'll put by your work now, man, and have your
supper, and then you'll come up and sit beside your mother for a
whiley, for soon you'll be putting her away in the kirk-yard.'

I hear such a little cry from near the door.

So my mother and I go up the stair together. 'We have changed
places,' she says; 'that was just how I used to help you up, but
I'm the bairn now.'

She brings out the Testament again; it was always lying within
reach; it is the lock of hair she left me when she died. And when
she has read for a long time she 'gives me a look,' as we say in
the north, and I go out, to leave her alone with God. She had been
but a child when her mother died, and so she fell early into the