stations the way your faither does in his high office; and let me hear
no more of any such disrespectful and undutiful questions! No that you
meant to be undutiful, my lamb; your mother kens that - she kens it
well, dearie!" And so slid off to safer topics, and left on the mind of
the child an obscure but ineradicable sense of something wrong.

Mrs. Weir's philosophy of life was summed in one expression -
tenderness. In her view of the universe, which was all lighted up with
a glow out of the doors of hell, good people must walk there in a kind
of ecstasy of tenderness. The beasts and plants had no souls; they were
here but for a day, and let their day pass gently! And as for the
immortal men, on what black, downward path were many of them wending,
and to what a horror of an immortality! "Are not two sparrows,"
"Whosoever shall smite thee," "God sendeth His rain," "Judge not, that
ye be not judged" - these texts made her body of divinity; she put them
on in the morning with her clothes and lay down to sleep with them at
night; they haunted her like a favourite air, they clung about her like
a favourite perfume. Their minister was a marrowy expounder of the law,
and my lord sat under him with relish; but Mrs. Weir respected him from
far off; heard him (like the cannon of a beleaguered city) usefully
booming outside on the dogmatic ramparts; and meanwhile, within and out
of shot, dwelt in her private garden which she watered with grateful
tears. It seems strange to say of this colourless and ineffectual
woman, but she was a true enthusiast, and might have made the sunshine
and the glory of a cloister. Perhaps none but Archie knew she could be
eloquent; perhaps none but he had seen her - her colour raised, her
hands clasped or quivering - glow with gentle ardour. There is a corner
of the policy of Hermiston, where you come suddenly in view of the
summit of Black Fell, sometimes like the mere grass top of a hill,
sometimes (and this is her own expression) like a precious jewel in the