Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/393

378 that I ‘would maybe be sorry yet, for going so much nearer Fort-George,’

Not much of her mother’s erudition had descended to her. She could read intelligently, and if ever there was a woman of one book, it was she. The Bible was her vademecwn. From it she drew the ‘&thinsp;’ditin’ of her limited correspondence; the writing, she admitted, bothered her. Bewildering both must have been to the recipients. Somebody’s blunder once involved me in an unintentional glimpse of a specimen. The first sentence suggested only a lunatic:—‘Dear Friend, you was a bird (bride), a wife, and a widow.’ In the second:—‘And the angel said unto the women. Fear not ye,’ I recognised, simultaneously a clue, in the text of the previous Sunday’s sermon, and the awful fact that I had opened a letter only sent to me for addressing (I was not absolutely sure to whom), which was to be reclaimed for inspection and posting in a few minutes. Any envelope in my possession was bound to betray interference, and confession would only convince the suspicious old woman, who had striven to sustain my integrity by repeated assurances that ‘It wasna’ everybody she would trust,’ that I had opened her letter wilfully, and read every word. I can now only remember that when I did next hazard an interview my relief was great to find the whimsical being had interpreted my change of envelope as a point of mourning etiquette due to the lady to whom it was addressed, and thanked me accordingly. So our friendship survived unimpaired. I was less fortunate in another transaction. In her declining years, when work and strength were failing, she accepted a little variety in her reading. After having exhausted Bunyan, John Newton’s Autobiography, and The Scots’ Worthies, I thought I had found a perfect treasure for her in an old book, Gillies’s Gospel History, treating of the revivals under the Wesleys and Whitefield. On my next visit her manifest displeasure soon voiced itself:—‘Whatna’ book was yon ye brocht me? Take it away, take it away; it has an Arminian smell aboot it.’

Perhaps her hands had profited by her mother’s teaching more than her mind. They were both diligent and ingenious.