r knew of her.
Jamie's mother never for an hour allowed that he had become anything but
the loving laddie of his youth.

"I ken 'im ower weel," she always said, "my ain Jamie."

Toward the end she was sure he was dead. I do not know when she first
made up her mind to this, nor whether it was not merely a phrase for
those who wanted to discuss him with her. I know that she still sat at
the window looking at the elbow of the brae.

The minister was with her when she died. She was in her chair, and he
asked her, as was his custom, if there was any particular chapter which
she would like him to read. Since her husband's death she had always
asked for the fourteenth of John, "Hendry's chapter," as it is still
called among a very few old people in Thrums. This time she asked him to
read the sixteenth chapter of Genesis.

"When I came to the thirteenth verse," the minister told me, "'And she
called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me,' she
covered her face with her two hands, and said, 'Joey's text, Joey's
text. Oh, but I grudged ye sair, Joey.'"

"I shut the book," the minister said, "when I came to the end of the
chapter, and then I saw that she was dead. It is my belief that her
heart broke one-and-twenty years ago."

AFTER THE SERMON

From 'The Little Minister': by permission of the American Publishers'
Corporation.

One may gossip in a glen on Sabbaths, though not in a town, without
losing his character, and I used to await the return of my neighbor, the
farmer of Waster Lunny, and of Birse, the Glen Quharity post, at the end
of the school-house path. Waster Lunny was a man whose care in his
leisure hours was to keep from his wife his great pride in her. His
horse, Catlaw, on the other hand, he told outright what he thought of
it, praising it to its face and blackguarding it as it deserved, and I
have seen him, when completely baffled by the brute, sit down before it
on a stone and thus harangue:--"You think you're clever, Catlaw, my
lass, but you're mista'en. You're a thrawn limmer, that's what you are.
You think you have blood in you. You ha'e blood! Gae awa, and dinna
blether. I tell you what, Catlaw, I met a man yestreen that kent your
mither, and he says she was a feikie,[3] fushionless besom. What do you
say to that?"

[Footnote 3: Feikie, over-particular.]

As for the post, I will say no more of him than that his bitter topic
was the unreasonableness of humanity, which treated