dest and dearest friend, and a
visit from any of her family was an occasion of great rejoicing.

"Eh, well, well!" Auntie Elspie was patting Christina on the back, and
taking off her hat in exuberant hospitality, mingling her words of
welcome with admonitions to the riotous dogs which were bounding about
making a joyous din.

"Eh, well, now, and your poor mother, she would be well! Hut, tut,
Wallace! Bruce! Yon's no way to act. And wee Mary'll be getting
married--Princie! Did ye ever see the like o' that? They're jist that
glad to see ye. Wallace! Down, sir, down! Jist wait till Gavie gits
home, Bruce, then ye'll mind! And Sandy's away to the college too.
Well, well, you Lindsays were all great for the books--come away in,
hinny, come away. Down with ye, down!"

They went into the house, the dogs still bounding joyously about, for
they knew that a guest at Craig-Ellachie was a great and glad event and
that they must express their joy in a fitting manner.

Auntie Elspie was tall and thin and stooped. Her thin fair hair,
almost white, was combed up in the fashion that had obtained when she
was a girl. She wore a voluminous old dress of some ancient pattern of
"print," that had been quite fashionable some twenty years earlier, but
she was also clothed in the gay garment of youth which the Grant Girls
always wore.

She managed to eject the joyous, scrambling quartette from the kitchen
and led the visitor through the dusk of the parlour where Auntie
Flora's organ stood with Gavin's fiddle on top of it, on into the gloom
of the spare room, heaping welcomes upon her all the way, and asking
after everything on the Lindsay farm from Grandpa's rheumatism to
Christina's black kitten.

When Christina's hat was laid upon the high white crest of the
billowing feather bed, and her hair smoothed before the little mirror
on the dresser, Auntie Elspie led her away beyond the parlour into a
close, hushed room, where the mother had lain an invalid for many
years, and which was kept sacred to her memory. Here the Grant Girls
hoarded all their mother's treasures: the photographs in oval frames on
the wall, the high old dresser and the big sea chest filled with
keepsakes, tenderly associated with her life; the Paisley shawl she
wore to church, the sea shells she had brought from the old country,
even the old china tea set that had been her one wedding gift.

Christina was placed in an old rocker, while Auntie Elspie dis