back and play it over," I heard him rather sigh
than say, whereat I bethought myself of the high allegory of a game.

Musing still, I stood apart, gazing as one gazes at a fire, which in
very truth I was.

"It is your shot, sir," he said, in a voice as passionless as when I
first heard it years before.

My ball had but left my cue when the door opened and a servant said--

"There's a young man doon the stair, sir, and he says he wants to speak
wi' the minister."

I descended, hearing as I went a rattling fusilade of ivory, which I
knew was the echo of a soul's thunder-storm.

* * * * *

How often do we meet new faces, little recking their relation to coming
years! Yet many an unfading light and many an incurable eclipse has come
with a transient meeting such as this! How many a woman of Samaria goes
to draw water from the well, and sees--the Lord! For I met only a boy,
or better, a laddie--boyhood-breathing word!--about sixteen years of
age, openly poor but pathetically decent. His clothes were coarse and
cheap and even darned, bearing here and there the signatures of poverty
and motherhood.

I advanced and took his hand; for that is an easy masonry, and its
exercise need never be regretted even if it never be repeated. My wife
once spent a plaintive day because she had wasted a hand-shake upon a
caller whom she took to be an applicant for matrimony, whose emoluments
were hers, but who turned out to be an agent for Smith's Dictionary of
the Bible, whose emoluments were his own. Nevertheless I have always
held that no true hand-shake is unrecorded in the book of life.

"And what can I do for you, my lad?" I said.

"I dinna ken, sir," he answered, in a voice that suggested a sea voyage,
for it was redolent of what lies only beyond the sea.

"What is your name?"

"Angus Strachan, sir, and I come frae Ettrick, and I hae my lines frae
the minister o' the Free Kirk."

"And when did you land, Mr. Strachan?"

"Ca' me Angus, sir, if ye please. Naebody has ca'd me by that name sin'
my mither pairted wi' me at the stage coach road, and she was fair
chokit wi' cryin', and when I cudna see her mair for the bush aboon the
burn, I could aye hear her bleatin' like a lamb--an' it was the
gloamin'. An' I can fair hear her yet. Will ye no' ca' me Angus?"

Accursed be the heart which has no opening door for the immigrant's
weary feet, and thrice accursed be the heart which remembers
strang