"He called out bears to eat the children up!" said one, who thought himself the scholar.
"Him what was thrown in the pit by his brothers," suggested another.
"Him what built the first Baptist chapel!" cried a third.
Jean found she must take them slowly, but her earnestness and sincerity carried weight, and her class increased to eighteen before she had had it for six weeks. It was a great interest to her, and she learnt as much as she taught them.
She heard from several of her friends, and her correspondence with them was a great pleasure to her.
Mrs. Douglas wrote from Cannes with real affection. She said that Colonel Douglas was growing gradually weaker, but "so cheerful and bright, and so interested in all that you are doing, Jean, dear."
Chris wrote bright, chatty letters, begging her to come and stay with them before the summer went, and Sunnie wrote her quaint, original epistles, always ending with—
"And I hope, my dear painter, that you will come to Scotland
soon again, for we want you badly."
Jean went about with a smile upon her lips at the thought of these writers, and Rawlings said one day to her, as she came out to him in the garden singing to herself—
"I always telled ye, Miss Jean, that you'd find your old home the happiest. Ye've got ten years younger since ye've come back, an' a month o' that there Lunnon do consume more lives away, and destroys more smiles an' music out of a body's heart than fifty year of country toil and honest work do!"