tone, and explained with college pedantry that it was hardly a
sermon, nor yet a lecture.

"You may call it a meditation."

"I will be calling it an essay without one bite of grass for
starving sheep."

Then the minister awoke from a pleasant dream, as if one had flung
cold water on his naked body.

"What was wrong?" with an anxious look at the stern little man who
of a sudden had become his judge.

"There wass nothing right, for I am not thinking that trees and
leaves and stubble fields will save our souls, and I did not hear
about sin and repentance and the work of Christ. It iss sound
doctrine that we need, and a great peety you are not giving it."

The minister had been made much of in college circles, and had a
fair idea of himself. He was a kindly lad, but he did not see why he
should be lectured by an old Highlandman who read nothing except
Puritans, and was blind with prejudice. When they parted that
Sabbath afternoon it was the younger man that had lost his temper,
and the other did not offer to shake hands.

Perhaps the minister would have understood Lachlan better if he had
known that the old man could not touch food when he got home, and
spent the evening in a fir wood praying for the lad he had begun to
love. And Lachlan would have had a lighter heart if he had heard the