"No," I replied, and I thought with some amusement of the freckled face and aureoled head of the village schoolmistress, who had got across with Lizzie on account of her inability to do sums and speak "gradely English." "She's an old lady, with white hair; she's my mother."
"Aye, I'll milk for thy mother," Lizzie answered; "but I'm thrang wi' sodgers this week an' next."
"Soldiers in camp?" I asked.
"Nay, sodgers i' t' hospital. Poor lads, they're sadly begone for want o' a sup o' milk. I can see 'em i' their beds i' them gert wards, and there's country lads amang 'em that knows all about cows an' plooin'. Their faces are as lang as a wet week when they think on that they've lossen an arm or a leg, an' will niver milk nor ploo no more. Eh! but I'm fain to milk for t' sodgers."
"But how can you be sure that the right people get your milk?" I asked at last.
She did not answer at once, and I knew that she was wondering at my stupidity, and considering how best she could make me understand. But she could find no words to bring home to my intelligence the confidence that was hers. All that she could say was: "It mun be so."
"It mun be so." At first I thought it was just the usual game of make-believe in which children love to indulge. But it was much more than this, and the simple words were an expression of her sure faith that what she willed must come to pass. "It mun be so." Why not? "If ye have faith, and shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea, it shall be done."
THE INNER VOICE
Fear is a resourceful demon, with whom we are engaged in perpetual conflict from the cradle to the grave. Fear assumes many forms, and has always a shrewd eye for the joints in that armour of courage and confidence which we put on in self-defence. One man conquers fear of danger only to fall a prey to fear of public opinion; another succumbs to superstitious fear, while a third, steadfast against all these, comes under the thraldom of the most insidious and malign of all forms of fear—the fear of death.