tless, a design in snow and ink; upon the one side, tender innocents
with psalms upon their lips; upon the other, the persecutors, booted,
bloody-minded, flushed with wine: a suffering Christ, a raging
Beelzebub. _Persecutor_ was a word that knocked upon the woman's heart;
it was her highest thought of wickedness, and the mark of it was on her
house. Her great-great-grandfather had drawn the sword against the
Lord's anointed on the field of Rullion Green, and breathed his last
(tradition said) in the arms of the detestable Dalyell. Nor could she
blind herself to this, that had they lived in those old days, Hermiston
himself would have been numbered alongside of Bloody Mackenzie and the
politic Lauderdale and Rothes, in the band of God's immediate enemies.
The sense of this moved her to the more fervour; she had a voice for
that name of _persecutor_ that thrilled in the child's marrow; and when
one day the mob hooted and hissed them all in my lord's travelling
carriage, and cried, "Down with the persecutor! down with Hanging
Hermiston!" and mamma covered her eyes and wept, and papa let down the
glass and looked out upon the rabble with his droll formidable face,
bitter and smiling, as they said he sometimes looked when he gave
sentence, Archie was for the moment too much amazed to be alarmed, but
he had scarce got his mother by herself before his shrill voice was
raised demanding an explanation: why had they called papa a persecutor?

"Keep me, my precious!" she exclaimed. "Keep me, my dear! this is
poleetical. Ye must never ask me anything poleetical, Erchie. Your
faither is a great man, my dear, and it's no for me or you to be judging
him. It would be telling us all, if we behaved ourselves in our several
stations the way your faither does in his high office; and let me hear
no more of any such disrespectful and undutiful questions! No that you
meant to be undutiful, my lamb; your mother kens that--she kens it well,
dearie!" And so slid off to safer topics, and left on the mind of the
child an obscure but ineradicable sense of something wrong.

Mrs. Weir's philosophy of life was summed in one expression--tenderness.
In her view of the universe, which was all lighted up with a glow out of
the doors of hell, good people must walk there in a kind of ecstasy of
tenderness. The beasts and plants had no souls; they were here but for a
day, and let their day pass gently! And as for the immortal men, on what
black, downward pa