BOOK SECOND

INTIMACIES

  I

  Take cedar, take the creamy card,
    With regal head at angle dight;
  And though to snatch the time be hard,
    To all our loves at home we’ll write.

  II

  Strange group! in Bowness’ street we stand—­
    Nine swains enamoured of our wives,
  Each quaintly writing on his hand,
    In haste, as ’twere to save our lives.

  III

  O wondrous messenger, to fly
    All through the night from post to post! 
  Thou bearest home a kiss, a sigh—­
    And but a halfpenny the cost!

  IV

  To-morrow when they crack their eggs,
    They’ll say beside each matin urn—­
  “These men are still upon their legs;
    Heaven bless ’em—­may they soon return!”

  GEORGE MILNER.

I

THE LAST ANDERSON OF DEESIDE

  Pleasant is sunshine after rain,
    Pleasant the sun;
  To cheer the parched land again,
    Pleasant the rain.

  Sweetest is joyance after pain,
    Sweetest is joy;
  Yet sorest sorrow worketh gain,
    Sorrow is gain.

  “As in the Days of Old.”

“Weel, he’s won awa’!”

“Ay, ay, he is that!”

The minister’s funeral was winding slowly out of the little manse loaning.  The window-blinds were all down, and their bald whiteness, like sightless eyes looking out of the white-washed walls and the trampled snow, made the Free Church manse of Deeside no cheerful picture that wild New Year’s Day.  The green gate which had so long hung on one hinge, periodically mended ever since the minister’s son broke the other swinging on it the summer of the dry year before he went to college, now swayed forward with a miserably forlorn lurch, as though it too had tried to follow the funeral procession of the man who had shut it carefully the last thing before he went to bed every night for forty years.

Andrew Malcolm, the Glencairn joiner, who was conducting the funeral—­if, indeed, Scots funerals can ever be said to be conducted—­had given it a too successful push to let the rickety hearse have plenty of sea-room between the granite pillars.  It was a long and straggling funeral, silent save for the words that stand at the opening of this tale, which ran up and down the long black files like the irregular fire of skirmishers.

“Ay, man, he’s won awa’!”

“Ay, ay, he is that!”

This is the Scottish Lowland “coronach,” characteristic and expressive as the wailing of the pipes to the Gael or the keening of women among the wild Eirionach.

“We are layin’ the last o’ the auld Andersons o’ Deeside amang the mools the day,” said Saunders M’Quhirr, the farmer of Drumquhat, to his friend Rob Adair of the Mains of Deeside, as they walked sedately together, neither swinging his arms as he would have done on an ordinary day.  Saunders had come all the way over Dee Water to follow the far-noted man of God to his rest.