Strangers do not touch our dead in Drumtochty, but the eight of
nearest blood lower the body into the grave. The order of precedence
is keenly calculated, and the loss of a merited cord can never be
forgiven. Marget had arranged everything with Whinnie, and all saw
the fitness. His father took the head, and the feet (next in honour)
he gave to Domsie.
"Ye maun dae it. Marget said ye were o' his ain bluid."
On the right side the cords were handed to the Doctor, Gordon, and
myself; and on the left to Drumsheugh, Maclean, and Chalmers. Domsie
lifted the hood for Marget, but the roses he gently placed on
George's name. Then with bent, uncovered heads, and in unbroken
silence, we buried all that remained of our scholar.
We always waited till the grave was filled and the turf laid down, a
trying quarter of an hour. Ah me! the thud of the spade on your
mother's grave! None gave any sign of what he felt save Drumsheugh,
whose sordid slough had slipped off from a tender heart, and
Chalmers, who went behind a tombstone and sobbed aloud. Not even
Posty asked the reason so much as by a look, and Drumtochty, as it
passed, made as though it did not see. But I marked that the Dominie
took Chalmers home, and walked all the way with him to Kildrummie
station next morning. His friends erected a granite cross over
George's grave, and it was left to Domsie to choose the inscription.
There was a day when it would have been "Whom the gods love die
young." Since then Domsie had seen the kingdom of God, and this is
graven where the roses bloomed fresh every summer for twenty years
till Marget was laid with her son:
GEORGE HOWE, M.A., Died September 22nd, 1869, Aged 21.
"They shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it."
It was a late November day when I went to see George's memorial, and
the immortal hope was burning low in my heart; but as I stood before
that cross, the sun struggled from behind a black watery bank of
cloud, and picked out every letter of the Apocalypse in gold.
A HIGHLAND MYSTIC
I
WHAT EYE HATH NOT SEEN
Strange ministers who came to assist at the Free Kirk Sacrament were
much impressed with the elders, and never forgot the transfiguration
of Donald Menzies, which used to begin about the middle of the
"action" sermon, and was completed at the singing of the last Psalm.
Once there was no glory, because the minister, being still young,
expounded a new theory of the atonement of German manufacture, and
Donald's face was piteous to behold. It haunted the minister for
months, and brought to confusion a promising course of sermons on
the contribution of Hegel to Christian thought. Donald never laid
the blame of such calamities on the preacher, but accepted them as a
just judgment on his blindness of heart.
"We hef had the open vision," Donald explained to his friend Lachlan
Campbell, who distributed the responsibility in another fashion,
"and we would not see--so the veil hass fallen."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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