The tears sprang to the Celt's eyes.

"It wass like him to make all other men much better than himself," withthe soft, sorrowful Highland accent; "and a proud woman you are to hefbeen his mother."

The third man waited at the window till the scholars left, and thenI saw he was none of that kind, but one who had been a slave of sinand now was free.

"Andra Chaumers, David wished ye tae hev his Bible, and he expecksye tae keep the tryst."

"God helping me, I will," said Chalmers, hoarsely; and from thegarden ascended a voice, "0 God, who art a very present help introuble."

The Doctor's funeral prayer was one of the glories of the parish,compelling even the Free Kirk to reluctant admiration, although theyhinted that its excellence was rather of the letter than the spirit,and regarded its indiscriminate charity with suspicion. It openedwith a series of extracts from the Psalms, relieved by two excursionsinto the minor prophets, and led up to a sonorous recitation of theproblem of immortality from Job, with its triumphant solution in theperoration of the fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians. Drumtochty menheld their breath till the Doctor reached the crest of the hill(Hillocks disgraced himself once by dropping his staff at the somewhatmoment when the Doctor was passing from Job to Paul), and then werelaxed while the Doctor descended to local detail. It was comprehendedthat it took twenty months to bring the body of this prayer to perfection,and any change would have been detected and resented.

The Doctor made a good start, and had already sighted Job, when hewas carried out of his course by a sudden current, and began tospeak to God about Marget and her son, after a fairly simple fashionthat brought a lump to the throat, till at last, as I imagine, thesight of the laddie working at his Greek in the study of a winternight came up before him, and the remnants of the great prayermelted like an iceberg in the Gulf Stream.