his passion for animals! (Jock Jardine reminds me of
him just a little.) There never was anyone more lovable and he was
killed in a Frontier raid--two in a year. Their father was gone, and for
that I was, thankful; one can bear sorrow oneself, but it is terrible to
see others suffer. Augusta was a rock in a weary land to me; nobody
knows what Augusta is but her mother. We had Sandy, our baby, left, and
we managed to go on. But Sandy was a soldier too, and when the Boer War
broke out, of course he had to go. I knew when I said good-bye to him
that whoever came back it wouldn't be my laddie. He was too
shining-eyed, too much all that was young and innocent and brave to win
through.... Archie and Jock were men, capable, well equipped to fight
the world, but Sandy was our baby--he was only twenty.... Of all the
things the dead possessed it is the thought of their gentleness that
breaks the heart. You can think of their qualities of brain and heart
and be proud, but when you think of their gentleness and their youth you
can only weep and weep. I think our hearts broke--Augusta's and
mine--when Sandy went.... He had been, they told us later, the life of
his company. His spirits never went down. It was early morning, and he
was singing 'Annie Laurie' when the bullet killed him--like a lark shot
down in the sun-rising.... His great friend came to see us when
everything was over. He was a very honest fellow, and couldn't have made
up things to tell us if he had tried. He sat and racked his brains for
details, for he saw that we hungered and thirsted for anything. At last
he said, 'Sandy was a funny fellow. If you left a cake near him he ate
all the currants out of it.' ... My little boy, my little, _little_ boy!
I don't know why I should cry. We had him for twenty years. Stir the
fire, will you, Pamela, and put on a log--I don't like it when it gets
dull. Old people need a blaze even when the sun is outside."

"You mustn't say you are old," Pamela said, as she threw on a log and
swept the hearth, shading her eyes, smarting with tears, from the blaze.
"You must stay with Augusta for a long time. Think how everyone would
miss you. Priorsford wouldn't be Priorsford without you."

"Priorsford would never look over its shoulder. Augusta would miss me,
yes, and some of the poor folk, but I've too ill-scrapit a tongue to be
much liked. Sorrow ought to make people more tender, but it made my
tongue bitter. To an unregenerate person with