ing aboot it, Mr. Ericson. I was only
bletherin' (talking nonsense)--rizzonin' frae the twa symbols o' the
cloud an' the fire--kennin' nothing aboot the thing itsel'. I'll awa' to
the kirk, an' see what it's like. Will I gie ye a buik afore I gang?'

'No, thank you. I'll just lie quiet till you come back--if I can.'

Robert instructed Shargar to watch for the slightest sound from the
sick-room, and went to church.

As he approached the granite cathedral, the only one in the world, I
presume, its stern solidity, so like the country and its men, laid hold
of his imagination for the first time. No doubt the necessity imposed
by the unyielding material had its share, and that a large one, in the
character of the building: whence else that simplest of west windows,
seven lofty, narrow slits of light, parted by granite shafts of equal
width, filling the space between the corner buttresses of the nave, and
reaching from door to roof? whence else the absence of tracery in the
windows--except the severely gracious curves into which the mullions
divide?--But this cause could not have determined those towers, so
strong that they might have borne their granite weight soaring aloft,
yet content with the depth of their foundation, and aspiring not. The
whole aspect of the building is an outcome, an absolute blossom of the
northern nature.

There is but the nave of the church remaining. About 1680, more than
a century after the Reformation, the great tower fell, destroying the
choir, chancel, and transept, which have never been rebuilt. May the
reviving faith of the nation in its own history, and God at the heart of
it, lead to the restoration of this grand old monument of the belief
of their fathers. Deformed as the interior then was with galleries, and
with Gavin Dunbar's flat ceiling, an awe fell upon Robert as he entered
it. When in after years he looked down from between the pillars of the
gallery, that creeps round the church through the thickness of the wall,
like an artery, and recalled the service of this Sunday morning, he felt
more strongly than ever that such a faith had not reared that cathedral.
The service was like the church only as a dead body is like a man. There
was no fervour in it, no aspiration. The great central tower was gone.

That morning prayers and sermon were philosophically dull, and
respectable as any after-dinner speech. Nor could it well be otherwise:
one of the favourite sayings of its minister wa