e 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 t