me, wull ye, Donal'?--an' the Maister 'll come back to guide ye, gin I'm
gone bye the gate. An' we'll aye walk thegither in the yonner-land."

Donald's face was dry, but drawn in its agony. Its ache passed on into
my soul. He bent over her like some bowing oak, and the rustle of love's
foliage was fairly audible to the inward ear, though the oak itself
seemed hard and gnarled as ever. He whispered something, like a mighty
organ lilting low and sweet some mother's lullaby, and no tutor except
Great Death could have taught Donald that gentle language. For I caught
the word "darling," and again "oor Saviour," and once "the hameland,"
and it was like a lark's gentlest note issuing from a mighty mountain's
cleft.

O Death, how unjustly thou hast been maligned! Men have painted thee as
cruel, monstrous, hateful, the enemy of love, the despoiler of the home,
the spirit of harshness, the destroyer of all poesy and romance. And yet
thou hast done more to fill life with softness and with gentle beauty
than all the powers of life and light whose antagonist thou hast been
called. Thou hast heaped coals of fire on thy traducers' heads. For hast
thou not made the heaviest foot fall lightly with love's considerate
tread? Hast thou not made the rough, coarse palm into a sanctuary and
pavilion wherein the dying hand may shelter? Hast thou not taught the
loud and boisterous voice the new song of tenderness and pity,
whispering like a dove? Within thy school the rude and harsh have
learned the nurse's gentle art, and the world's swaggering warriors
serve as acolytes before thy shadowy altar. The peasant's cottage owes
to thee its transformation to cathedral splendour, the censers gently
swinging when thou sayest the soul's great mass, at even, or at
midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning. Thou hast classed
together the hovel and the palace, glowing with equal solemn grandeur,
so that no man can tell the one from the other when the crape upon the
door betokens that thou tarriest there. Thou hast promoted sodden sleep
to be the most awful metaphor of time. Thou hast stripped wealth and
grandeur, leaving them but a shroud, and hast clothed obscurity and
poverty with their eternally suggestive robe; thou hast affirmed, and
thou preserved, that grim average of life which greatness refuses, which
littleness fears, to realize. Romance and Poetry and Fancy are thy
wards, making as thou dost the most holden eyes to overleap time's po