"May God bless you, Jamie," he said.

"Ye'll be gaen noo to see the mither," said Jamie, after a long space.

"Ay, for the last time. An', Jamie, ye'll see that nae harm cams to her
when I'm far awa'?"

The smith promised, and also agreed to have John Paul's chests sent by
wagon, that very day, to Dumfries. And we left him at his forge, his
honest breast torn with emotion, looking after us.




CHAPTER XXI

THE GARDENER'S COTTAGE

So we walked out of the village, with many a head craned after us and
many an eye peeping from behind a shutter, and on into the open highway.
The day was heavenly bright, the wind humming around us and playing mad
pranks with the white cotton clouds, and I forgot awhile the pity within
me to wonder at the orderly look of the country, the hedges with never a
stone out of place, and the bars always up. The ground was parcelled off
in such bits as to make me smile when I remembered our own wide tracts in
the New World. Here waste was sin: with us part and parcel of a creed.
I marvelled, too, at the primness and solidity of the houses along the
road, and remarked how their lines belonged rather to the landscape than
to themselves. But I was conscious ever of a strange wish to expand, for
I felt as tho' I were in the land of the Liliputians, and the thought of