366 The Little Minister

* Not much longer could I have taken you in
any case, for already we are at the day when
Adam Dishart came back. It was the seventh
of September, and all the week. most of the
women in Harvie had been setting off at dawn to
the harvest fields and straggling home at nights,
_ merry and with yellow corn in their hair. I had
sat on in the schoolhouse that day after my
pupils were gone. I still meant to be a minister,
and I was studying Hebrew, and so absorbed in
my book that, as the daylight went, I followed it
step by step as far as my window, and there I
read, without knowing, until I chanced to look
up, that I had left my desk. I have not opened
that book since.

“From the window I saw you on the waste
ground that separated the school from our home.
You weré coming to me on your hands and feet,
and stopping now and again to look back at your
mother, who was at the door, laughing and shak-
ing her fist at you. I beckoned to you, and took
the book back to my desk to lock it up. While
my head was inside the desk I heard the school-
house door pushed open, and thinking it was you
I smiled, without looking up. Then something
touched my hand, and I still thought it was you;
but I looked down, and I saw Adam Dishart’s
black dog.

“I did not move. It looked up at me and
wagged its tail. Then it drew back, —I suppose
because I had no words for it. I watched it run
half round the room and stop and look at me
again. ‘Then it slunk out.

“ All that time one of my hands had been hold-