The dying ears must have been quick, for John Broom heard nothing; but in a few minutes he heard the bagpipes from the officers’ mess, where they were keeping Hogmenay.  They were playing the old year out with “Auld Lang Syne,” and the Highlander beat the time out with his hand, and his eyes gleamed out of his rugged face in the dim light, as cairngorms glitter in dark tartan.

There was a pause after the first verse, and he grew restless, and turning doubtfully to where John Broom sat, as if his sight were failing, he said:  “Ye’ll mind your promise, ye’ll gang hame?” And after a while he repeated the last word “Hame!”

     But as he spoke there spread over his face a smile so tender and so
     full of happiness, that John Broom held his breath as he watched
     him.

     As the light of sunrise creeps over the face of some rugged rock,
     it crept from chin to brow, and the pale blue eyes shone tranquil,
     like water that reflects heaven.

     And when it had passed it left them still open, but gems that had
     lost their ray.

Death-beds are not the only things which Julie had the power of picturing out of her inner consciousness apart from actual experience.  She was much amused by the pertinacity with which unknown correspondents occasionally inquired after her “little ones,” unable to give her the credit of describing and understanding children unless she possessed some of her own.  There is a graceful touch at the end of “Lob,” which seems to me one of the most delicate evidences of her universal sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men,—­and women!  It is similar in character to the passage I alluded to in “Timothy’s Shoes,” where they clatter away for the last time, into silence.

Even after the sobering influences of middle age had touched him, and a wife and children bound him with the quiet ties of home, he had (at long intervals) his “restless times,” when his good “missis” would bring out a little store laid by in one of the children’s socks, and would bid him “Be off, and get a breath of the sea air,” but on condition that the sock went with, him as his purse.  John Broom always looked ashamed to go, but he came back the better, and his wife was quite easy in his absence with that confidence in her knowledge of “the master,” which is so mysterious to the unmarried.

* * * * *

     “The sock ’ll bring him home,” said Mrs. Broom, and home he came,
     and never could say what he had been doing.