The herald., 1896-04-05

his ease in the only pew, for no other
gregation of solid plaided men, strapping
/ wives and daughters, oppressed children,
and uneasy sheep-dogs. 1t was strange how
| Archie missed the look OF race; except the
| dogs, with their refined foxy faces and in
imitably curling tails, there was no one
present with the least claim to gentility.
The Cauldstaneslap party was scarcely an
exception. Dandie perhaps, as he amused
himself making verses through the inter-
minable burden OF the service stood out
| little by the glow in his eye and a cer-
tain superior animation of face and alert
| ness of body; but even Dandie slouched like
| rustic. The rest of the congregation, like
| so many sheep, oppressed him with a sense
OF hob-nailed routine. day following day
of physical labor in the open air, oatmeal
porridge, peas hammock, the somnolent fire.
side in the evening, and the night-long
| nasal slumbers in a box-bed. Yet he
knew many Of them to be shrewd and hu-
| morous, men of character, notable women,
making hustle in the world and radiating
an influence from their low-browed doors.
He knew besides they were like other men
below the crust of custom, rapture found
a way; he had heard them beat the tim
brel before Bacchus-had heard them shout
and carouse over their whisky toddy; and
not the most Dutch -bottomed and severe
faces among them all, not even the SOL
emn elders themselves, but were capable
of singular gambols at the voice of love.
Men drawing near to an end of life's ad-
venturous journey-maids thrilling with
fear and curiosity on the threshold of en-
trance-women who had borne and per-
haps buried children, who could remember
the clinging of the small dead hand and
the patter of the little feet now silent-he
marvelled that among all those faces there
should be no face of expectation, none that
was mobile, none into which the rythm
and poetry of life had entered. 20 for q
live face" he thought; and at times he had
a memory of Lady Janet; and at times he
would study the living gallery before him
with despair and would see himself go on
to waste his days in that joyless pastoral
place, and death come to him, and his grave
be dug under the rowans, and the spirit
of the Earth laugh out in a Handicapped
at the huge fiasco.
On this particular Sunday, there was no
doubt but that the spring had come at
last. 1t was warm, with a latent shiver
in the air that made the warmth only the
more welcome. The shadows of the stream
glittered and tinkled among punches of
primrose. Vagrant scents of the earth ar
rested Archie by the way with moments
of ethereal intoxication. The grey.
Quakerish dale was still only awakened in
places and patches from the sobriety of its
winter coloring; and he wondered at its
beauty; an essential beauty of the old
earth it seemed to him, not resident in
particulars but breathing to him from the
whole. He surprised himself by sudden
impulse to write poetry-he did sometimes,
loose. galloping octosyllablcs in the vein
, of Scotland when he had taken his place
on a boulder, near some fairy falls and
shaded by a whip of tree that was al
ready radiant with new leaves, it still
more surprised him that he should find
nothing to write. His heart perhaps beat
in time to some vast indwelling rhyme of
the universe. By the time he came to q
corner of the valley and could see the kirk
he had so fingered by the way that the
first psalm was finishing. The nasal psalm
ody, full OF turns and trills and graceless
graces, seemed the essential voice of the
kirk itself upraised in thanksgiving. "Ev-
erything's alive" he said and again cries
e aloud, thank God, everything's alivev'
He fingered ~ awhile in the kirk yard.