ding the fields. Never had my native village seemed so small to
me. Perhaps because I had just been in some considerable danger, a
thing which enlarges the mental horizon. I looked for Elsie's house
down there. But though I could see the silver glint of the water, I
could not make out the cottage at the Bridge End. There was a mist,
however, creeping up from the sea, so that in a little while, even as I
looked, the whole valley became a pearl-grey lake, with only the tall
ash trees and the solitary church spire standing up out of the smother.

We found old Caleb, an infrequent smile on his face, leaning over the
bars of his yard gate.

"Them that hasna their hay weel covered," he chuckled, "runs a chance
o' gettin' it sprinkled a wee!"

"Then," said Mr. Ablethorpe, "you owe me something for the afternoon's
work I gave you!"

"Yon!" cried the old man, ungratefully, "caa ye that half a day's wark?
But I'm far frae denyin' that, sic as it was, it helped. Ow, ay, it
was aye a help! And at ony rate the hay's under cover--some
thack-and-rape, and some in the new-fangled shed. But what's your
wull? Ye are no seekin' wages, I'm thinkin'. Maybe ye want me to turn
my coat and come doon to your bit tabernacle? Aweel, ye may want."

"Oh, no," said Mr. Ablethorpe, smiling. "I was just hoping that
perhaps your good wife would brew us a cup of tea. I think both Joe
and I would be the better of it."

You should have seen how the old farmer's face lit up. Hospitality was
a beautiful thing to him. He rejoiced in that, at least. And if, as
some folk say--not Mr. Ablethorpe--an elder is the same as a bishop,
then the old Free Kirker had at least one of the necessary qualities.
He was "given to hospitality." Whether he was, as is also required,
"no striker," I would not just like to say, or to try.

But Caleb took us indoors out of the slight oncoming drizzle, which was
beginning to spray down from the clouds, or creep up from the
valleys--I am not sure which. At any rate, it was there,
close-serried, wetting.

Now heretofore I had only seen Mrs. Caleb when she was ordered down
from the long stack under the zinc-roofed shed, which her husband was
never tired of declaiming against as "new-fangled," yet to which he
owed that night the safety of his crop.

Mrs. Caleb was a good twenty years younger than her lord, still,
indeed, bearing traces of that special kind of good looks which the
Scots call "sonsiness." Sus