a cow’s grass, and thirty pound sterling in the year as a charge on the estate.  He drove down the cow himself, and having stalled it in the byre, he informed her of the fact over the yard dyke by word of mouth, for he never could be induced to enter her door.  He was accounted to be “gey an’ queer,” save by those who had tried making a bargain with him.  But his farmers liked him, knowing him to be an easy man with those who had been really unfortunate, for he knew to what the year’s crops of each had amounted, to a single chalder and head of nowt.

Deep in her heart Janet Balchrystie cherished a great ambition.  When the earliest blackbird awoke and began to sing, while it was yet gray twilight, Janet would be up and at her work.  She had an ambition to be a great poet.  No less than this would serve her.  But not even her father had known, and no other had any chance of knowing.  In the black leather chest, which had been her mother’s, upstairs, there was a slowly growing pile of manuscript, and the editor of the local paper received every other week a poem, longer or shorter, for his Poet’s Corner, in an envelope with the New Dalry postmark.  He was an obliging editor, and generally gave the closely written manuscript to the senior office boy, who had passed the sixth standard, to cut down, tinker the rhymes, and lope any superfluity of feet.  The senior office boy “just spread himself,” as he said, and delighted to do the job in style.  But there was a woman fading into a gray old-maidishness which had hardly ever been girlhood, who did not at all approve of these corrections.  She endured them because over the signature of “Heather Bell” it was a joy to see in the rich, close luxury of type her own poetry, even though it might be a trifle tattered and tossed about by hands ruthless and alien—­those, in fact, of the senior office boy.

Janet walked every other week to the post-office at New Dalry to post her letters to the editor, but neither the great man nor yet the senior office boy had any conception that the verses of their “esteemed correspondent” were written by a woman too early old who dwelt alone at the back of Barbrax Long Wood.

One day Janet took a sudden but long-meditated journey.  She went down by rail from the little station of The Huts to the large town of Drum, thirty miles to the east.  Here, with the most perfect courage and dignity of bearing, she interviewed a printer and arranged for the publication of her poems in their own original form, no longer staled and clapper-clawed by the pencil of the senior office boy.  When the proof-sheets came to Janet, she had no way of indicating the corrections but by again writing the whole poem out in a neat print hand on the edge of the proof, and underscoring the words which were to be altered.  This, when you think of it, is a very good way, when the happiest part of your life is to be spent in such concrete pleasures of hope, as Janet’s were over the