the nets. Maggie peering through misty gloom for the boats, out on the
angry sea. Maggie bending over the open Bible. Maggie with a neighbor's
baby cuddled up to her breast. Maggie rowing, with the wind blowing her
fine hair like a cloud around her. Maggie knitting by the fireside, her
face beaming with sisterly love on the pale dark face of her brother
David. As Allan had said, "Maggie everywhere."

The elder man went back to look at several of the pictures; he stood long
before the one on the easel. He sat down again, still silent; but Allan
saw that there was no anger on his face.

"Well, father?"

"She is a grand looking woman. No one can deny that. A peasant woman,
though?"

"Yes, sir, a peasant woman; the daughter of a Fife fisherman."

"She is not a common peasant woman. You could not believe that she would
ever kick her heels in a 'foursome reel,' or pass coarse jokes with the
lads. Yet she must be uneducated, and perhaps vulgar."

"She is never vulgar, sir. She has a soul, and she is conscious of it. She
had parents, grave and thoughtful, who governed by a look, without waste
of words. Though she lives on the wild Fife coast, she has grown up
beneath the shade of Judea's palms; for the Bible has blended itself with
all her life. Sarah, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, and David, are far more real
people to her than Peel or Wellington, or Jenny Lind, or even Victoria.
She has been fed upon faith, subjected to duty, and made familiar with
sorrow and suffering and death. The very week I met her, she had lost her