hough to snatch the time be hard,
To all our loves at home we'll write_.

II

_Strange group! in Bowness' street we stand--
Nine swains enamoured of our wives,
Each quaintly writing on his hand,
In haste, as 'twere to save our lives_.

III

_O wondrous messenger, to fly
All through the night from post to post!
Thou bearest home a kiss, a sigh--
And but a halfpenny the cost_!

IV

_To-morrow when they crack their eggs,
They'll say beside each matin urn--
"These men are still upon their legs;
Heaven bless 'em--may they soon return_!"

GEORGE MILNER.

I

THE LAST ANDERSON OF DEESIDE

_Pleasant is sunshine after rain,
Pleasant the sun;
To cheer the parched land again,
Pleasant the rain_.

_Sweetest is joyance after pain,
Sweetest is joy;
Yet sorest sorrow worketh gain,
Sorrow is gain_.

"_As in the Days of Old_."

"Weel, he's won awa'!"

"Ay, ay, he is that!"

The minister's funeral was winding slowly out of the little manse
loaning. The window-blinds were all down, and their bald whiteness, like
sightless eyes looking out of the white-washed walls and the trampled
snow, made the Free Church manse of Deeside no cheerful picture that
wild New Year's Day. The green gate which had so long hung on one hinge,
periodically mended ever since the minister's son broke the other
swinging on it the summer of the dry year before he went to college, now
swayed forward with a miserably forlorn lurch, as though it too had
tried to follow the funeral procession of the man who had shut it
carefully the last thing before he went to bed every night for forty
years.

Andrew Malcolm, the Glencairn joiner, who was conducting the
funeral--if, indeed, Scots funerals can ever be said to be
conducted--had given it a too successful push to let the rickety hearse
have plenty of sea-room between the granite pillars. It was a long and
straggling funeral, silent save for the words that stand at the opening
of this tale, which ran up and down the long black files like the
irregular fire of skirmishers.

"Ay, man, he's won awa'!"

"Ay, ay, he is that!"

This is the Scottish Lowland "coronach," characteristic and expressive
as the wailing of the pipes to the Gael or the keening of women among
the wild Eirionach.

"We are layin' the last o' the auld Andersons o' Deeside amang the mools
the day," said Saunders M'Quhirr, the farmer of Drumquh