"
"The Lord grant a blessed uprisin' to you an' me, Jonathan, at that
day!" said Wattie, in the tone of one who felt himself uttering a
more than ordinarily religious sentiment and on the word followed
the sound of their retreating footsteps.
"How closely together may come the solemn and the grotesque! the
ludicrous and the majestic!" said the schoolmaster. "Here, to us
lingering in awe about the doors beyond which lie the gulfs of the
unknown--to our very side come the wright and the grave digger
with their talk of the strength of coffins and the judgment of the
living God!"
"I hae whiles thoucht mysel', sir," said Malcolm, "it was gey strange
like to hae a wuman o' the mak o' Mistress Catanach sittin' at the
receipt o' bairns, like the gatekeeper o' the ither wan', wi' the
hasp o' 't in her han': it doesna promise ower weel for them 'at
she lats in. An' noo ye hae pitten't intil my heid that there's
Wattie Witherspail an' Jonathan Auldbuird for the porters to open
an' lat a' that's left o' 's oot again! Think o' sic like haein'
sic a han' in sic solemn maitters!"
"Indeed some of us have strange porters," said Mr Graham, with a
smile, "both to open to us and to close behind us! yet even in them
lies the human nature, which, itself the embodiment of the unknown,
wanders out through the gates of mystery, to wander back, it may
be, in a manner not altogether unlike that by which it came."
In contemplative moods, the schoolmaster spoke in a calm and
loftily sustained style of book English--quite another language
from that he used when he sought to rouse the consciences of his
pupils, and strangely contrasted with that in which Malcolm kept
up his side of the dialogue.
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