be a merciful release--every one but Cree.

Cree had been a grinder from his youth, having learned the trade from
his father, but he gave it up when Mysy became almost blind. For a
time he had to leave her in Thrums with Dan'l Wilkie's wife, and find
employment himself in Tilliedrum. Mysy got me to write several letters
for her to Cree, and she cried while telling me what to say. I never
heard either of them use a term of endearment to the other, but all
Mysy could tell me to put in writing was--"Oh, my son Cree; oh, my
beloved son; oh, I have no one but you; oh, thou God watch over my
Cree!" On one of these occasions Mysy put into my hands a paper,
which, she said, would perhaps help me to write the letter. It had
been drawn up by Cree many years before, when he and his mother had
been compelled to part for a time, and I saw from it that he had been
trying to teach Mysy to write. The paper consisted of phrases such as
"Dear son Cree," "Loving mother," "I am takin' my food weel,"
"Yesterday," "Blankets," "The peats is near done," "Mr. Dishart," "Come
home, Cree." The Grinder had left this paper with his mother, and she
had written letters to him from it.

When Dan'l Wilkie objected to keeping a cranky old body like Mysy in
his house Cree came back to Thrums and took a single room with a
hand-loom in it. The flooring was only lumpy earth, with sacks spread
over it to protect Mysy's feet. The room contained two dilapidated old
coffin-beds, a dresser, a high-backed arm-chair, several three-legged
stools, and two tables, of which one could be packed away beneath the
other. In one corner stood the wheel at which Cree had to fill his own
pirns. There was a plate-rack on one wall, and near the chimney-piece
hung the wag-at-the-wall clock, the timepiece that was commonest in
Thrums at that time, and that got this name because its exposed
pendulum swung along the wall. The two windows in the room faced each
other on opposite walls, and were so small that even a child might have
stuck in trying to crawl through them. They opened on hinges, like a
door. In the wall of the dark passage leading from the outer door into
the room was a recess where a pan and pitcher of water always stood
wedded, as it were, and a little hole, known as the "bole," in the wall
opposite the fireplace contained Cree's library. It consisted of
Baxter's "Saints' Rest," Harvey's "Meditations," the "Pilgrim's
Progress," a work on folk-lore, an