hardly saw him, but I kent, I kent, for I was on the bank alane.  What did I do?  I flung mysel’ down in a sweat, and if een could bore mist mine would hae done it.  I thocht I heard the minister’s death-cry, and may I be struck if I dinna believe now that it was a skirl o’ my ain.  After that there was no sound but the jaw o’ the water; and I prayed, but no to God, to the mist to rise, and after an awful time it rose, and I saw the minister was safe; he had pulled the earl into the middle o’ the bit island and was rubbing him back to consciousness.  I sweat when I think o’t yet.”

The Little Minister’s jump is always spoken of as a brave act in the glen, but at such times I am silent.  This is not because, being timid myself, I am without admiration for courage.  My little maid says that three in every four of my poems are to the praise of prowess, and she has not forgotten how I carried her on my shoulder once to Tilliedrum to see a soldier who had won the Victoria Cross, and made her shake hands with him, though he was very drunk.  Only last year one of my scholars declared to me that Nelson never said “England expects every man this day to do his duty,” for which I thrashed the boy and sent him to the cooling-stone.  But was it brave of Gavin to jump?  I have heard some maintain that only misery made him so bold, and others that he jumped because it seemed a fine thing to risk his life for an enemy.  But these are really charges of cowardice, and my boy was never a coward.  Of the two kinds of courage, however, he did not then show the nobler.  I am glad that he was ready for such an act, but he should have remembered Margaret and Babbie.  As it was, he may be said to have forced them to jump with him.  Not to attempt a gallant deed for which one has the impulse, may be braver than the doing of it.

“Though it seemed as lang time,” the shepherd says, “as I could hae run up a hill in, I dinna suppose it was many minutes afore I saw Rintoul opening and shutting his een.  The next glint I had o’ them they were speaking to ane another; ay, and mair than speaking.  They were quarrelling.  I couldna hear their words, but there was a moment when I thocht they were to grapple.  Lads, the memory o’ that’ll hing about deathbed.  There was twa men, edicated to the highest pitch, ane a lord and the other a minister, and the flood was taking awa a mouthful o’ their footing ilka minute, and the jaws o’ destruction was gaping for them, and yet they were near fechting.  We ken now it was about a woman.  Ay, but does that make it less awful?”

No, that did not make it less awful.  It was even awful that Gavin’s first words when Rintoul opened his eyes and closed them hastily were, “Where is she?” The earl did not answer; indeed, for the moment the words had no meaning to him.

“How did I come here?” he asked feebly.

“You should know better than I. Where is my wife?”

“I remember now,” Rintoul repeated several times.  “Yes, I had left the Spittal to look for you—­you were so long in coming.  How did I find you?”