she was
making her exit, without applause. Memory brought back a picture of
Minnie as I had first seen her, a wee thing, blinking and smiling in the
arms of her Madonna-faced mother, on a bench in Our Square, and the
mother (who could not wait for the promised return--she has lain in
God's Acre these three years) crooning to her an unforgettable song,
mournfully prophetic:

"Why did I bring thee, Sweet
Into a world of sin?--
Into a world of wonder and doubt
With sorrows and snares for the little white feet--
Into a world whence the going out
Is as dark as the coming in!"

Old lips readily lend themselves to memory; I suppose I must have
repeated the final lines aloud, for the pink man said, wearily
but politely:

"Very pretty. Something more in the local line?"

"Hardly." I smiled. Between Bartholomew Storr's elegies and William
Young's "Wish-makers' Town" stretches an infinite chasm.

"What's this--now--God's Acre the kid was talking about?" was his next
question.

"An old local graveyard."

"Anything interesting?" he asked carelessly.

"If you're interested in that sort of thing. Are you an antiquary?"

"Sure!" he replied with such offhand promptitude that I was certain the
answer would have been the same had I asked him if he was a dromedary.

"Come along, then. I'll take you there."

To reach that little green space of peace amidst our turmoil of the
crowded, encroaching slums, we must pass the Bonnie Lassie's house,
where her tiny figurines, touched with the fire of her love and her
genius, which are perhaps one and the same, stand ever on guard, looking
out over Our Square from her windows. Judging by his appearance and
conversation, I should have supposed my companion to be as little
concerned with art as with, let us say, poetry or local antiquities. But
he stopped dead in his tracks, before the first window. Fingers that
were like steel claws buried themselves in my arm. The other
hand pointed.

"What's that?" he muttered fiercely.

"That," to which he was pointing, was a pictorial bronze, the figure of
a girl, upright in a cockleshell boat, made of a rose-petal, her arms
outspread to the breeze that was bearing her out across sunlit ripples.
Beneath was the legend: "Far Ports." The face, eager, laughing,
passionate, adventurous, was the face of Minnie Munn. Therein the Bonnie
Lassie had been prophetess as well as poet and sculptress, for she had
finished the bronze before Minni