middle of words,
and sometimes there is a note of interrogation after "alas" or "Woes
me," because all the notes of exclamation had been used up.

Jimsy never cared to speak about his great poem even to his closest
friends, but Janet told how he read it out to her, and that his whole
body trembled with excitement while he raised his eyes to heaven as if
asking for inspiration that would enable his voice to do justice to his
writing. So grand it was, said Janet, that her stocking would slip
from her fingers as he read--and Janet's stockings, that she was always
knitting when not otherwise engaged, did not slip from her hands
readily. After her death he was heard by his neighbours reciting the
poem to himself, generally with his door locked. He is said to have
declaimed part of it one still evening from the top of the commonty
like one addressing a multitude, and the idlers who had crept up to
jeer at him fell back when they saw his face. He walked through them,
they told, with his old body straight once more, and a queer light
playing on his face. His lips are moving as I see him turning the
corner of the brae. So he passed from youth to old age, and all his
life seemed a dream, except that part of it in which he was writing, or
printing, or stitching, or binding "The Millennium." At last the work
was completed.

"It is finished," he printed at the end of the last book. "The task of
thirty years is over."

It is indeed over. No one ever read "The Millennium." I am not going
to sentimentalize over my copy, for how much of it have I read? But
neither shall I say that it was written to no end.

You may care to know the last of Jimsy, though in one sense he was
blotted out when the last copy was bound. He had saved one hundred
pounds by that time, and being now neither able to work nor to live
alone, his friends cast about for a home for his remaining years. He
was very spent and feeble, yet he had the fear that he might be still
alive when all his money was gone. After that was the workhouse. He
covered sheets of paper with calculations about how long the hundred
pounds would last if he gave away for board and lodgings ten shillings,
nine shillings, seven and sixpence a week. At last, with sore
misgivings, he went to live with a family who took him for eight
shillings. Less than a month afterwards he died.

CHAPTER XI

THE GHOST CRADLE

Our dinner-hour was twelve o'clock, and Hendry, for a n