leaner, whan ye kenned I micht be at han'!'"

With all the cleaning she could give it, her cottage would have
looked but a place of misery to many a benevolent woman, who, if she
had lived there, would not have been so benevolent as Janet, or have
kept the place half so clean. For her soul was alive and rich, and
out of her soul, not education or habit, came the smallest of her
virtues.--Having finished at last, she took her besom to the door,
and beat it against a stone. That done, she stood looking along the
path down the hill. It was that by which her sons and daughters,
every Saturday, came climbing, one after the other, to her bosom,
from their various labours in the valley below, through the sunset,
through the long twilight, through the moonlight, each urged by a
heart eager to look again upon father and mother.

The sun was now far down his western arc, and nearly on a level with
her eyes; and as she gazed into the darkness of the too much light,
suddenly emerged from it, rose upward, staggered towards her--was it
an angel? was it a spectre? Did her old eyes deceive her? or was
the second sight born in her now first in her old age?--It seemed a
child--reeling, and spreading out hands that groped. She covered
her eyes for a moment, for it might be a vision in the sun, not on
the earth--and looked again. It was indeed a naked child! and--was
she still so dazzled by the red sun as to see red where red was
none?--or were those indeed blood-red streaks on his white skin?
Straight now, though slow, he came towards her. It was the same
child who had come and gone so strangely before! He held out his
hands to her, and fell on his face at her feet like one dead. Then,
with a horror of pitiful amazement, she saw a great cross marked in
two cruel stripes on his back; and the thoughts that thereupon went
coursing through her loving imagination, it would be hard to set
forth. Could it be that the Lord was still, child and man,
suffering for his race, to deliver his brothers and sisters from
their sins?--wandering, enduring, beaten, blessing still? accepting
the evil, slaying it, and returning none? his patience the one rock
where the evil word finds no echo; his heart the one gulf into which
the dead-sea wave rushes with no recoil--from which ever flows back
only purest water, sweet and cool; the one abyss of destroying love,
into which all wrong tumbles, and finding no reaction, is lost,
ceases for evermore