s own portrait taken in
the suit which his father had bought him to go to college in. He had
found the old man's wealth. A strangeness in his father's attitude
caught his eye. With a sudden, quick return of boyish affection he laid
his hand on the bowed shoulder, forgetting for the moment his evil
purpose and all else. The attenuated figure swayed and would have fallen
to the side, had Clement Symington not caught it and laid his father
tenderly on the bed. Then he stood upright and cried aloud in agony with
that most terrible of griefs--the repentance that comes too late. But
none heard him. The deaf woman slept on. And the dead gave no answer,
being also for ever deaf and dumb.

II

A MINISTER'S DAY

_On either side the great and still ice sea
Are compassing snow mountains near and far;
While, dominant, Schreckhorn and Finsteraar
Hold their grim peaks aloft defiantly_.

_Blind with excess of light and glory, we,
Above whose heads in hottest mid-day glare
The Schreckhorn and his sons arise in air,
Sink in the weary snowfields to the knee_;

_Then, resting after peril pass'd in haste,
We saw, from our rock-shelter'd vantage ledge,
In the white fervent heat sole shadowy spot_,

_Familiar eyes that smiled amid the waste--
Lo! in the sparsed snow at the glacier edge,
The small blue flower they call Forget-me-not_!

The sun was glinting slantwise over the undulating uplands to the east.
Ben Gairn was blushing a rosy purple, purer and fainter than the
flamboyant hues of sunset, when the Reverend Richard Cameron looked out
of his bedroom window in the little whitewashed manse of Cairn Edward.
His own favourite blackbird had awakened him, and he lay for a long
while listening to its mellow fluting, till his conscience reproached
him for lying so long a-bed on such a morning.

Richard Cameron was by nature an early riser, a gift to thank God for.
Many a Sabbath morning he had seen the sun rise from the ivy-grown
arbour in the secluded garden behind the old whitewashed kirk. It was
his habit to rise early, and, with the notes of his sermon in hand, to
memorise, or "mandate," them, as it was called. So that on Sabbath, when
the hill-folk gathered calm and slow, there might be no hesitation, and
he might be able to pray the Cameronian supplication, "And bring the
truth premeditated to ready recollection"--a prayer which no mere
"reader" of a discourse would ever dare t