Every Saturday old Robbie Angus sent a bag of sticks and shavings from the sawmill by his little son Rob, who was afterward to become a man for speaking about at nights. Of all the friends that Jess and Hendry had, T'nowhead was the ablest to help, and the sweetest memory I have of the farmer and his wife is the delicate way they offered it. You who read will see Jess wince at the offer of charity. But the poor have fine feelings beneath the grime, as you will discover if you care to look for them; and when Jess said she would bake if anyone would buy, you would wonder to hear how many kindly folk came to her door for scones. She had the house to herself at nights, but Tibbie Birse was with her early in the morning, and other neighbors dropped in. Not for long did she have to wait the summons to the better home. "Na," she said to the minister, who has told me that he was a better man from knowing her, "my thocht is no nane set on the vanities o' the world noo. I kenna hoo I could ever hae haen sic an ambeetion to hae thae stuff-bottomed chairs." I have tried to keep away from Jamie, whom the neighbors sometimes upbraided in her presence. It is of him you who read would like to hear, and I cannot pretend that Jess did not sit at her window looking for him. "Even when she was bakin'," Tibbie told me, "she aye had an eye on the brae. If Jamie had come at ony time when it was licht she would hae seen 'im as sune as he turned the corner." "If he ever comes back, the sacket" (rascal), T'nowhead said to Jess, "we'll show 'im the door gey quick." Jess just looked, and all the women knew how she would take Jamie to her arms. We did not know of the London woman then, and Jess never knew of her. Jamie's mother never for an hour allowed that he had become anything but the loving laddie of his youth. "I ken 'im ower weel," she always said, "my ain Jamie." Toward the end she was sure he was dead. I do not know when she first made up her mind to this, nor whether it was not merely a phrase for those who wanted to discuss him with her. I know that she still sat at the window looking at the elbow of the brae. The minister was with her when she died. She was in her chair, and he asked her, as was his custom, if there was any particular chapter which she would like him to read. Since her husband's death she had always asked for the fourteenth of John, "Hendry's chapter," as it is still called among a very few old people in Thrums. This time she asked him to read the sixteenth chapter of Genesis. "When I came to the thirteenth verse," the minister told me, "'And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me,' she covered her face with her two hands, and said, 'Joey's text, Joey's text. Oh, but I grudged ye sair, Joey.'" "I shut the book," the minister said, "when I came to the end of the chapter, and then I saw that she was dead. It is my belief that her heart broke one-and-twenty years ago." AFTER THE SERMON