The Love- Light | 3

mingle. Margaret was crying because she was so
proud of her boy. Women do that. Poor sons
to be proud of, good mothers, but I would not
have you dry those tears.

When the little minister looked out at the
carriage window, many of the people drew back
humbly, but a little boy in a red frock with black
spots pressed forward and offered him a sticky
parly, which Gavin accepted, though not without
a tremor, for children were more terrible to him
then than bearded men. The boy’s mother, try-
ing not to look elated, bore him away, but her
face said that he was made for life. With this
little incident Gavin’s career in Thrums began.
I remembered it suddenly the other day when
wading across the wynd where it took place.
Many scenes in the little minister’s life come back
to me in this way. The first time I ever thought
of writing his love story as an old man’s gift to a
little maid-since grown tall, was one night while I
sat alone in the schoolhouse; on my knees a
fiddle that has been my only living companion
since I sold my hens. My mind had drifted
back to the first time I saw Gavin and the Egyp-
tian together, and what set it wandering to that
midnight meeting was my garden gate shaking in
the wind. At a gate on the hill I had first en-
countered these two. It rattled in his hand, and
I looked up and saw them, and neither knew why
I had such cause to start at the sight. Then the
gate swung to. It had just such a click as mine.

These two figures on the hill are more real to
me than things that happened yesterday, but I do
not know that I can make them live to others.