certain superior animation of face and alertness of body; but even
Dandie slouched like a rustic. The rest of the congregation, like so
many sheep, oppressed him with a sense of hob-nailed routine, day
following day - of physical labour in the open air, oatmeal porridge,
peas bannock the somnolent fireside in the evening, and the night-long
nasal slumbers in a box-bed. Yet he knew many of them to be shrewd and
humorous, men of character, notable women, making a bustle in the world
and radiating an influence from their low-browed doors. He knew besides
they were like other men; below the crust of custom, rapture found a
way; he had heard them beat the timbrel before Bacchus - had heard them
shout and carouse over their whisky-toddy; and not the most Dutch-
bottomed and severe faces among them all, not even the solemn elders
themselves, but were capable of singular gambols at the voice of love.
Men drawing near to an end of life's adventurous journey - maids
thrilling with fear and curiosity on the threshold of entrance - women
who had borne and perhaps buried children, who could remember the
clinging of the small dead hands and the patter of the little feet now
silent - he marvelled that among all those faces there should be no face
of expectation, none that was mobile, none into which the rhythm and
poetry of life had entered. "O for a live face," he thought; and at
times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the
living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to
waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death come to him,
and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh
out in a thunder-peal at the huge fiasco.

On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the spring had
come at last. It was warm, with a latent shiver in the air that made
the warmth only the more welcome. The shallows of the stream glittered
and tinkled among bunches of primrose. Vagrant scents of the earth