a dream-bud in the brain of the man. He saw the face
of Jesus looking on him over the top of the Wicket-gate, at which he had
been for some time knocking in vain, while the cruel dog barked loud from
the enemy's yard. But that face, when at last it came, was full of
sorrowful displeasure. And in his heart he knew that it was because of a
certain transaction in horse-dealing wherein he had hitherto lauded his
own cunning--adroitness, he considered it--and success. One word only he
heard from the lips of the Man, "Worker of iniquity!" and woke with a
great start. From that moment truths _began_ to be facts to him. The
beginning of the change was indeed very small, but every beginning is
small, and every beginning is a creation. Monad, molecule, protoplasm,
whatever word may be attached to it when it becomes appreciable by
men--being then, however, many stages, I believe, upon its
journey--beginning is an irrepressible fact; and, however far from good or
humble even after many days, the man here began to grow good and humble.
His dull, unimaginative nature, a perfect lumber-room of the world and its
rusting affairs, had received a gift in a dream--a truth from the lips of
the Lord, remodeled in the brain and heart of the tinker of Elstow, and
sent forth in his wondrous parable to be pictured and printed, and lie in
old Hector Crathie's cottage, that it might enter and lie in young Hector
Crathie's brain until he grew old and had done wrong enough to heed it,
when it rose upon him in a dream, and had its way. Henceforth the claims
of his neighbor began to reveal themselves, and his mind to breed
conscientious doubts and scruples, with which, struggle as he might
against it, a certain respect for Malcolm would keep coming and
mingling--a feeling which grew with its returns, until, by slow changes,
he began at length to regard him as the minister of God's vengeance for
his punishment, and perhaps salvation--who could tell?

Lizzy's nightly ministrations had not been resumed, but she often called,
and was a good deal with him; for Mrs. Crathie had learned to like the
humble, helpful girl still better when she found she had taken no offence
at being deprived of her post of honor by his bed-side. One day, when
Malcolm was seated, mending a net, among the thin grass and great red
daisies of the links by the bank of the burn where it crossed the sands
from the Lossie grounds to the sea, Lizzy came up to him and said, "The
factor w