r and Walter sat for a long time in the heat of the noonday
regarding one another with undisguised interest. They were in the midst
of a plain of moorland, over which a haze of heat hung like a
diaphanous veil. Over the edge there appeared, like a plain of blue
mist, the strath, with the whitewashed farmhouses glimmering up like
patches of snow on a March hillside. The minister came down from the
dyke and sat beside the boy on the heather clumps.

"You are a herd, you tell me. Well, so am I--I am a shepherd of men,
though unworthy of such a charge," he added.

Walter looked for further light.

"Did you ever hear," continued Mr. Cameron, looking away over the
valley, "of One who went about, almost barefoot like you, over rocky
roads and up and down hillsides?"

"Ye needna tell me--I ken His name," said Walter reverently.

"Well," continued the minister, "would you not like to be a herd like
Him, and look after men and not sheep?"

"Sheep need to be lookit after as weel," said Walter.

"But sheep have no souls to be saved!" said Richard Cameron.

"Dowgs hae!" asserted Walter stoutly.

"What makes you say so?" said the minister indulgently. He was out for a
holiday.

"Because, if my dowg Royal hasna a soul, there's a heap o' fowk gangs to
the kirk withoot!"

"What does Royal do that makes you think that he has a soul?" asked the
minister.

"Weel, for ae thing, he gangs to the kirk every Sabbath, and lies in the
passage, an' he'll no as muckle as snack at a flee that lichts on his
nose--a thing he's verra fond o' on a week day. An' if it's no' yersel'
that's preachin', my gran'faither says that he'll rise an' gang oot till
the sermon's by."

The minister felt keenly the implied compliment.

"And mair nor that, he disna haud wi' repeating tunes," said Walter,
who, though a boy, knew the name of every tune in the psalmody--for that
was one of the books which could with safety be looked at under the
bookboard when the minister was laying down his "fifthly," and when some
one had put leaden clogs on the hands of the little yellow-faced clock
in the front of the gallery--a clock which in the pauses of the sermon
could be heard ticking distinctly, with a staidness and devotion to the
matter in hand which were quite Cameronian.

"Repeating tunes!" said the minister, with a certain painful
recollection of a storm in his session on the Thursday after the
precentor had set up "Artaxerxes" in front of him and sung i