n, I
was aye fond o' my bairns, and slaved for them till I dropped. She'll
have long forgotten what I was like, and it's just as well, but
yet--Look at me, Tommy, look long, long, so as you'll be able to call up
my face as it was on the far-back night when I telled you my mournful
story. Na, you canna see in the dark, but haud my hand, haud it tight,
so that, when you tell Elspeth, you'll mind how hot it was, and the skin
loose on it; and put your hand on my cheeks, man, and feel how wet they
are wi' sorrowful tears, and lay it on my breast, so that you can tell
her how I was shrunk awa'. And if she greets for her mother a whiley,
let her greet."

The sobbing boy hugged his mother. "Do you think I'm an auld woman?" she
said to him.

"You're gey auld, are you no'?" he answered.

"Ay," she said, "I'm gey auld; I'm nine and twenty. I was seventeen on
the day when Aaron Latta went half-road in the cart wi' me to Cullew,
hauding my hand aneath my shawl. He hadna spiered me, but I just kent."

Tommy remained in his mother's bed for the rest of the night, and so
many things were buzzing in his brain that not for an hour did he think
it time to repeat his new prayer. At last he said reverently: "O God,
keep me from being a magerful man!" Then he opened his eyes to let God
see that his prayer was ended, and added to himself: "But I think I
would fell like it."

CHAPTER XI

AARON LATTA

The Airlie post had dropped the letters for outlying farms at the
Monypenny smithy and trudged on. The smith having wiped his hand on his
hair, made a row of them, without looking at the addresses, on his
window-sill, where, happening to be seven in number, they were almost a
model of Monypenny, which is within hail of Thrums, but round the corner
from it, and so has ways of its own. With the next clang on the anvil
the middle letter fell flat, and now the likeness to Monypenny was
absolute.

Again all the sound in the land was the melancholy sweet kink, kink,
kink of the smith's hammer.

Across the road sat Dite Deuchars, the mole-catcher, a solitary figure,
taking his pleasure on the dyke. Behind him was the flour-miller's
field, and beyond it the Den, of which only some tree-tops were visible.
He looked wearily east the road, but no one emerged from Thrums; he
looked wearily west the road, which doubled out of sight at Aaron
Latta's cottage, little more than a stone's throw distant. On the inside
of Aaron's window an endles