the farm house, stopped at the other, the kitchen one. It stood open, and
in answer to her modest knock, a ruddy maid appeared, with a question in
her eyes, and a smile on her lips at sight of the shoemaker's Maggie, whom
she knew well. Maggie asked if She might see the mistress.

"Here's soutar's Maggie wanting ye, mem!" said the maid and Mistress
Blatherwick who was close at hand, came; to which Maggie humbly but
confidently making her request had it as kindly granted, and followed her
to the barn to fill her pock with the light plumy covering of the husk of
the oats, the mistress of Stonecross helping her the while and talking to
her as she did so--for the soutar and his daughter were favourites with
her and her husband, and they had not seen either of them for some while.

"Ye used to ken oor Maister Jeames I' the auld land-syne, Maggie!" for the
two has played together as children in the same school although growth and
difference in station had gradually put and end to their intimacy so that
it became the mother to refer to him with circumspection, seeing that, in
her eyes at least, Maister Jeames was now far on the way to becoming a
great man, being a divinity student; for in the Scotch church, although it
sets small store on apostolitic descent, every Minister, until he has shown
himself eccentic or incapable of interesting a congregation, is regarded
with quite as much respect as in England is accorded to the claimant of a
phantom-priesthood; and therefore, prospectively, Jeames was to his mother
a man of no little note. Maggie remembered how, when a boy, he had liked to
talk with her father; and how her father would listen to him with a
curious look on his rugged face, while the boy set forth the commonplaces
of a lifeless theology with an occasional freshness of logical
presentation that at least interested himself. But she remembered also
that she had never heard the soutar on his side make any attempt to lay
open to the boy his stores of what one or two in the place, one or two