“I ken ’im ower weel,” she always said, “my ain Jamie.”

Toward the end she was sure he was dead.  I do not know when she first made up her mind to this, nor whether it was not merely a phrase for those who wanted to discuss him with her.  I know that she still sat at the window looking at the elbow of the brae.

The minister was with her when she died.  She was in her chair, and he asked her, as was his custom, if there was any particular chapter which she would like him to read.  Since her husband’s death she had always asked for the fourteenth of John, “Hendry’s chapter,” as it is still called among a very few old people in Thrums.  This time she asked him to read the sixteenth chapter of Genesis.

“When I came to the thirteenth verse,” the minister told me, “’And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me,’ she covered her face with her two hands, and said, ’Joey’s text, Joey’s text.  Oh, but I grudged ye sair, Joey.’”

“I shut the book,” the minister said, “when I came to the end of the chapter, and then I saw that she was dead.  It is my belief that her heart broke one-and-twenty years ago.”

AFTER THE SERMON

From ‘The Little Minister’:  by permission of the American Publishers’ Corporation.

One may gossip in a glen on Sabbaths, though not in a town, without losing his character, and I used to await the return of my neighbor, the farmer of Waster Lunny, and of Birse, the Glen Quharity post, at the end of the school-house path.  Waster Lunny was a man whose care in his leisure hours was to keep from his wife his great pride in her.  His horse, Catlaw, on the other hand, he told outright what he thought of it, praising it to its face and blackguarding it as it deserved, and I have seen him, when completely baffled by the brute, sit down before it on a stone and thus harangue:—­“You think you’re clever, Catlaw, my lass, but you’re mista’en.  You’re a thrawn limmer, that’s what you are.  You think you have blood in you.  You ha’e blood!  Gae awa, and dinna blether.  I tell you what, Catlaw, I met a man yestreen that kent your mither, and he says she was a feikie,[3] fushionless besom.  What do you say to that?”

[Footnote 3:  Feikie, over-particular.]

As for the post, I will say no more of him than that his bitter topic was the unreasonableness of humanity, which treated him graciously when he had a letter for it, but scowled at him when he had none, “aye implying that I ha’e a letter, but keep it back.”

On the Sabbath evening after the riot, I stood at the usual place awaiting my friends, and saw before they reached me that they had something untoward to tell.  The farmer, his wife, and three children, holding each other’s hands, stretched across the road.  Birse was a little behind, but a conversation was being kept up by shouting.  All were walking the Sabbath pace, and the family having started half a minute in advance, the post had not yet made up on them.