ven the solemn elders themselves, but were
capable of singular gambols at the voice of love. Men drawing near to an
end of life's adventurous journey--maids thrilling with fear and
curiosity on the threshold of entrance--women who had borne and perhaps
buried children, who could remember the clinging of the small dead hands
and the patter of the little feet now silent--he marvelled that among
all those faces there should be no face of expectation, none that was
mobile, none into which the rhythm and poetry of life had entered. "O
for a live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady
Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with
despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless,
pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the
rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at the
huge fiasco.

On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the spring had
come at last. It was warm, with a latent shiver in the air that made the
warmth only the more welcome. The shallows of the stream glittered and
tinkled among bunches of primrose. Vagrant scents of the earth arrested
Archie by the way with moments of ethereal intoxication. The grey,
Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from the
sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its beauty; an
essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him, not resident in
particulars but breathing to him from the whole. He surprised himself by
a sudden impulse to write poetry--he did so sometimes, loose, galloping
octosyllabics in the vein of Scott--and when he had taken his place on a
boulder, near some fairy falls and shaded by a whip of a tree that was
already radiant with new leaves, it still more surprised him that he
should find nothing to write. His heart perhaps beat in time to some
vast indwelling rhythm of the universe. By the time he came to a corner
of the valley and could see the kirk, he had so lingered by the way that
the first psalm was finishing. The nasal psalmody, full of turns and
trills and graceless graces, seemed the essential voice of the kirk
itself upraised in thanksgiving. "Everything's alive," he said; and
again cries it aloud, "thank God, everything's alive!" He lingered yet a
while in the kirkyard. A tuft of primroses was blooming hard by the leg
of an old, black table tombstone, and he stopped to contemplate the
random apologu