Page:Robert Carter- his life and work. 1807-1889 (IA robertcarterhis00coch).pdf/32

16 bonnet from his head, and the child saw his father’s lips move in prayer as he silently gave thanks to God before stooping to drink. It was an object lesson which he never forgot. Through life his grateful thought always went up to the Giver before enjoying the gift. It is pleasant to think that, as the son afterwards told the story in many a Sunday school, the simple act of that Scottish peasant, who would not take so much as a drink of water without thanking God for it, lived on for more than seventy years, and is still told “for a memorial of him.” He often used another memory of his father as an illustration of the Heavenly Father’s care. His vivid imagination, excited by the stories often told among the peasantry of “ghaists and bogies,” made him as a child timid when alone in the dark. One night he had been making a visit with his father to the house of a neighbor, and as they returned home a severe thunder-storm came up. His father noticed how the little fellow shrank and shuddered at the swift and vivid flashes of lightning, and, drawing him closer to his side, threw over his head the skirts of the long loose mantle he was wearing, and so the boy walked through the darkness, clinging to his father’s hand, and lapped in the folds of his cloak, until they reached the safe and happy fireside of their own home.

His strong imagination had ample food to feed upon in the tales of the Scottish border which were rife about them. He often described to his children how the neighbors would gather about their blazing fire of a winter’s evening, and one and another would relate stories of life and adventure in the days of chivalry. Some of them he loved to repeat to the close of his life. Two of these stories he so often recounted to an interested circle of listeners, that they seemed to those