a’ richt, an’ syne exerceese thy michty power e’en ower thine ain sel, an’ clean forget them a’thegither; cast them ahint thy back, whaur e’en thine ain een shall ne’er see them again, that we may walk bold an’ upricht afore thee for evermore, an’ see the face o’ Him wha was as muckle God in doin’ thy biddin’, as gin he had been ordering’ a’ thing Himsel.  For his sake, Ahmen.”

I hope my readers will not suppose that I give this as a specimen of Scotch prayers.  I know better than that.  David was an unusual man, and his prayers were unusual prayers.  The present was a little more so in its style, from the fact that one of the subjects of it was absent, a circumstance that rarely happened.  But the degree of difference was too small to be detected by any but those who were quite accustomed to his forms of thought and expression.  How much of it Janet understood or sympathized with, it is difficult to say; for anything that could be called a thought rarely crossed the threshold of her utterance.  On this occasion, the moment the prayer was ended, she rose from her knees, smoothed down her check apron, and went to the door; where, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand, she peered from under its penthouse into the fir-wood, and said in a voice softened apparently by the exercise in which she had taken a silent share,

“Whaur can the lassie be?”

And where was the lassie?  In the fir-wood, to be sure, with the thousand shadows, and the sunlight through it all; for at this moment the light fell upon her far in its depths, and revealed her hastening towards the cottage in as straight a line as the trees would permit, now blotted out by a crossing shadow, and anon radiant in the sunlight, appearing and vanishing as she threaded the upright warp of the fir-wood.  It was morning all around her; and one might see that it was morning within her too, as, emerging at last in the small open space around the cottage, Margaret—­I cannot call her Meg, although her mother does—­her father always called her “Maggy, my doo,” Anglice, dove—­Margaret approached her mother with a bright healthful face, and the least possible expression of uneasiness on her fair forehead.  She carried a book in her hand.

“What gars ye gang stravaguin’ that get, Meg, whan ye ken weel eneuch ye sud a’ been in to worship lang syne?  An sae we maun hae worship our lanes for want o’ you, ye hizzy!”

“I didna ken it was sae late, mither,” replied Margaret, in a submissive tone, musical in spite of the rugged dialect into which the sounds were fashioned.

“Nae dout!  Ye had yer brakfast, an’ ye warna that hungry for the word.  But here comes yer father, and ye’ll no mend for his flytin’, I’se promise.”

“Hoots! lat the bairn alane, Janet, my woman.  The word’ll be mair to her afore lang.”

“I wat she has a word o’ her nain there.  What beuk hae ye gotten there, Meg?  Whaur got ye’t?”