st of the night. But the gale had engineered well, and as the
minister looked over the half mile that separated the kirk from the
nearest house of the clachan he knew that not a soul would be able to
come to the kirk that day. Yet it never occurred to him to put off the
service of the sanctuary. He was quite willing to preach to Euphemia
Kerr alone, even so precious a discourse as he carried in his band-case
that day.

The minister was his own precentor, as, according to the law and
regulation of the kirks of Scotland, he always is in the last resort,
however he may choose to delegate his authority. He gave out from his
swallow's nest the Twenty-third Psalm, and led it off himself in a
powerful and expressive voice, which sounded strangely in the empty
church. The tune was taken up from the manse pew, in the dusk under the
little gallery, by a quavering, uncertain pipe--as dry and unsympathetic
as, contrariwise, the singer was warm-hearted and full of the very sap
of human kindness. The minister was so absorbed in his own full-hearted
praise that he was scarce conscious that he was almost alone in the
chill emptiness of the church. Indeed, a strange feeling stole upon him,
that he heard his wife's voice singing the solemn gladness of the last
verse along with him, as they had sung it together near forty years ago
when she had first come to the hill kirk of Cauldshields.

"Goodness and mercy all my life
Shall surely follow me:
And in God's house for evermore
My dwelling-place shall be."

Then the prayer echoed along the walls, bare like a barn before the
harvest. Nevertheless, I doubt not that it went straight to the throne
of God as the minister pleaded for the weary and the heavy-laden, the
fatherless and the oppressed, for the little children and those on whom
the Lord has special pity--"for to Thee, O Lord, more are the children
of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord."
And the minister seemed to hear somewhere a sound of silent weeping,
like that which he had hearkened to in the night long ago, when his wife
sorrowed by his side and wept in the darkness for the loss of their only
man-bairn.

The minister gave out his text. There was silence within, and without
the empty church only the whistling sough of the snowdrift. "And when he
was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and
ran, and fell on his neck and kissed him."

There was a moment's paus