loaning. The window-blinds were all down, and their bald whiteness, like
sightless eyes looking out of the white-washed walls and the trampled
snow, made the Free Church manse of Deeside no cheerful picture that
wild New Year's Day. The green gate which had so long hung on one hinge,
periodically mended ever since the minister's son broke the other
swinging on it the summer of the dry year before he went to college, now
swayed forward with a miserably forlorn lurch, as though it too had
tried to follow the funeral procession of the man who had shut it
carefully the last thing before he went to bed every night for forty
years.

Andrew Malcolm, the Glencairn joiner, who was conducting the
funeral--if, indeed, Scots funerals can ever be said to be
conducted--had given it a too successful push to let the rickety hearse
have plenty of sea-room between the granite pillars. It was a long and
straggling funeral, silent save for the words that stand at the opening
of this tale, which ran up and down the long black files like the
irregular fire of skirmishers.

"Ay, man, he's won awa'!"

"Ay, ay, he is that!"

This is the Scottish Lowland "coronach," characteristic and expressive
as the wailing of the pipes to the Gael or the keening of women among
the wild Eirionach.

"We are layin' the last o' the auld Andersons o' Deeside amang the mools
the day," said Saunders M'Quhirr, the farmer of Drumquhat, to his friend
Rob Adair of the Mains of Deeside, as they walked sedately together,