“A doomed man's whim,” thought I, and professed myself vastly gratified by his gift. He died next morning. It was Candlemas Day. He went out at last like a crusie wanting oil. In the morning he had sat up in bed to sup porridge that, following a practice I had made before his reminiscences concluded, I had taken in to him myself. Tremendous long and lean the upper part of him looked, and the cicatrice upon his brow made his ghastliness the more appalling. When he sat against the bolsters he could see through the window into the holm field, and, as it happened, what was there but a wild young roe-deer driven down from some higher part of the country by stress of winter weather, and a couple of mongrel dogs keeping him at bay in an angle of the fail dyke. I have seldom seen a man more vastly moved than Uncle Andrew looking upon this tragedy of the wilds. He gasped as though his chest would crack, a sweat burst on his face. “That's--that's the end o't, Paul, my lad!” said he. “Yonder's your roving uncle, and the tykes have got him cornered at last. No more the heather and the brae; no more--no more--no more--” Such a change came on him that I ran and cried my mother ben, and she and father were soon at his bedside. It was to her he turned his eyes, that had seen so much of the spacious world of men and women and all their multifarious interests, great and little. They shone with a light of memory and affection, so that I got there and then a glimpse of the Uncle Andrew of innocence and the Uncle Andrew who might have been if fate had had it otherwise. He put out his hand and took hers, and said goodbye. “The hounds have me, Katrine,” said he. “I'm at the fail dyke corner.” “I'll go out and whistle them off, uncle,” said I, fancying it all a doited man's illusion, though the look of death was on him; but I stood rebuked in the frank gaze he gave me of a fuller comprehension than mine, though he answered me not. And then he took my father's hand in his other, and to him too he said farewell. “You're there, Quentin!” said he; “and Katrine--Katrine--Katrine chose by far the better man. God be merciful to poor Andy Greig, a sinner.” And these were his last words. CHAPTER V A SPOILED TRYST, AND OTHER THINGS THAT FOLLOWED ON THE OPENING OF THE CHEST The funeral was over before I cared to examine my bequest, and then I went to it with some reluctance, for if a pair of shoes was the chief contents of the brass-bound chest, there was like to be little else except the melancholy relics of a botched life. It lay where he left it on the night he came--under the foot of his bed--and when I lifted the lid I felt as if I was spying upon a man through a keyhole. Yet, when I came more minutely to examine the contents, I was disappointed that at the first reflection nothing was there half so pregnant as his own most casual tale to rouse in me the pleasant excitation of romance.