world's freedom. Simple peasant folk they were,
but with that look of grave and thoughtful steadfastness with which
Scotland knows how to stamp her people.

The devotions were conducted by the minister with simple sincerity,
and with a prophet's mystic touch and a prophet's vision of things
invisible.

Barry made no attempt at a sermon. He yielded himself to the spirit
of the place, the spirit of the manse and its people, whose serene
fortitude under the burden of their sorrow had stirred him to his soul's
depths. Their spirit recalled the spirit of his own father and the
spirit of the men he had known in the trenches. He made a slight
reference to the horrors of the war. He touched lightly upon the
soldiers' trials but he told them tales of their endurance, their
patience, their tenderness to the wounded, their comradeship, their
readiness to sacrifice. Before he closed, he lifted them up to see the
worth and splendour of it all and gave them a vision of the world's
regeneration through the eternal mystery of the cross.

They listened with uplifted face, on which rested a quiet wonder,
touched with that light that only falls where sacrifice and sacrament
are joined. There were tears on many faces, but they fell quietly,
without bitterness, without passion, without despair.

A woman with a grief worn face waited for him at the foot of the pulpit
stairs, the minister's wife and Phyllis beside her.

"Mrs. Finlayson wishes to speak to you," she said.

"Ay, ay! I jist want to say that you had the word for me the day. I
see it better the noo. A'm mair content that ma mon sud be sleepin' oot
yonder." She held Barry's hand while she spoke, her tears falling on it,
then kissed it and turned away.

"And this," said the minister's wife, "is Mrs. Murray, who has given
three sons, and who has just sent her last son away this week."

"Three sons," echoed Barry, gazing at the strong face, beaten and brown
with the winds and suns of fifty years, "and you sent away your last.
Oh, I wonder at you. How could you?"

"A cudna haud him back wi' his three brithers lyin' oot there, and," she
added, with a proud lift of her head, "and wudna."

It took some minutes for Barry to make his way through to the door. He
wanted to greet them all. He had a feeling that he was there not in his
own person but as a representative standing between two noble companies
of martyrs, those who had gone forth to die, and those who had sent
them.

"