it?"

"I think I thought I was Betsy at the time," Tommy answered, with proper
awe.

"She told me nothing about the weeping-willow at the grave," said the
Dominie, perhaps in self-defence.

"You hadna speired if there was one," retorted Tommy, jealously.

"What made you think of it?"

"I saw it might come in neat." (He had said in the letter that the
weeping-willow reminded him of the days when Janet's bonny hair hung
down kissing her waist just as the willow kissed the grave.)

"Willows don't hang so low as you seem to think," said the Dominie.

"Yes, they do," replied Tommy, "I walked three miles to see one to make
sure. I was near putting in another beautiful bit about
weeping-willows."

"Well, why didn't you?"

Tommy looked up with an impudent snigger. "You could never guess," he
said.

"Answer me at once," thundered his preceptor. "Was it because--"

"No," interrupted Tommy, so conscious of Mr. Cathro's inferiority that
to let him go on seemed waste of time. "It was because, though it is a
beautiful thing in itself, I felt a servant lassie wouldna have thought
o't. I was sweer," he admitted, with a sigh; then firmly, "but I cut it
out."

Again Cathro admired, reluctantly. The hack does feel the difference
between himself and the artist. Cathro might possibly have had the idea,
he could not have cut it out.

_But_ the hack is sometimes, or usually, or nearly always the artist's
master, and can make him suffer for his dem'd superiority.

"What made you snivel when you read the pathetic bits?" asked Cathro,
with itching fingers.

"I was so sorry for Peter and Mrs. Dinnie," Tommy answered, a little
puzzled himself now. "I saw them so clear."

"And yet until Betsy came to you, you had never heard tell of them?"

"No."

"And on reflection you don't care a doit about them?"

"N-no."

"And you care as little for Betsy?"

"No now, but at the time I a kind of thought I was to be married to
Andrew."

"And even while you blubbered you were saying to yourself, 'What a
clever billie I am!'"

Mr. Cathro had certainly intended to end the scene with the strap, but
as he stretched out his hand for it he had another idea. "Do you know
why Nether Drumgley's sheep are branded with the letters N.D.?" he asked
his pupils, and a dozen replied, "So as all may ken wha they belong to."

"Precisely," said Mr. Cathro, "and similarly they used to brand a letter
on a felon, so that all might know whom _he_ belon