ather died a clean strae death, as the folk say,' said Mary.

'True,' I returned; 'and a wreck is like a judgment. What was she
called?'

'They ca'd her the _Christ-Anna_,' said a voice behind me; and, turning
round, I saw my uncle standing in the doorway.

He was a sour, small, bilious man, with a long face and very dark eyes;
fifty-six years old, sound and active in body, and with an air somewhat
between that of a shepherd and that of a man following the sea. He never
laughed, that I heard; read long at the Bible; prayed much, like the
Cameronians he had been brought up among; and indeed, in many ways, used
to remind me of one of the hill-preachers in the killing times before the
Revolution. But he never got much comfort, nor even, as I used to think,
much guidance, by his piety. He had his black fits when he was afraid of
hell; but he had led a rough life, to which he would look back with envy,
and was still a rough, cold, gloomy man.

As he came in at the door out of the sunlight, with his bonnet on his
head and a pipe hanging in his button-hole, he seemed, like Rorie, to
have grown older and paler, the lines were deeplier ploughed upon his
face, and the whites of his eyes were yellow, like old stained ivory, or
the bones of the dead.

'Ay' he repeated, dwelling upon the first part of the word, 'the _Christ-
Anna_. It's an awfu' name.'

I made him my salutations, and complimented him upon his look of health;
for I feared he had perhaps been ill.

'I'm in the body,' he replied, ungraciously enough; 'aye in the body and
the sins of the body, like yoursel'. Denner,' he said abruptly to Mary,
and then ran on to me: 'They're grand braws, thir that we hae gotten, are
they no? Yon's a bonny knock {15}, but it'll no gang; and the napery's
by ordnar. Bonny, bairnly braws; it's for the like o' them folk sells
the peace of God that passeth understanding; it's for the like o' them,
an' maybe no even sae muckle worth, folk daunton God to His face and burn
in muckle hell; and it's for that reason the Scripture ca's them, as I
read the passage, the accursed thing. Mary, ye girzie,' he interrupted
himself to cry with some asperity, 'what for hae ye no put out the twa
candlesticks?'

'Why should we need them at high noon?' she asked.

But my uncle was not to be turned from his idea. 'We'll bruik {16} them
while we may,' he said; and so two massive candlesticks of wrought silver
were added to the table equipage, a