“Yes, I mind,” said Graeme.
“And I mind, too,” said Rose, softly.
“It’s a bonny place,” said Mrs Snow, in a little, “and it has changed but little in all those years. The woods have gone back a little on some of the hills; and the trees about the village and the kirkyard have grown larger and closer, and that is mostly all the changes.”
“The old meeting-house has a dreary look, now that it is never used,” said Rose, regretfully.
“Ay, it has that. I mind thinking it a grand and stately object, when I first saw it from the side of the water. That was before I had been in it, or very near it. But I learnt to love it for better things than stateliness, before very long. I was ill-pleased when they first spoke of pulling it down, but, as you say, it is a dreary object, now that it is no longer used, and the sooner it goes the better.”
“Yes, a ruin to be an object of interest, should be of grey stone, with wallflowers and ivy growing over it,” said Graeme.
“Yes, but this is not a country for ruins, and such like sorrowful things. The old kirk was good enough to worship in, to my thinking, for many a year to come; and the new one will ay lack something that the old one had, to you and me, and many a one besides; but the sooner the forsaken old place is taken quite away, the better, now.”
“Yes, there is nothing venerable in broken sashes, and fluttering shingles. But I wish they had repaired it for a while, or at any rate, built the new one on the same site. We shall never have any pleasant associations with the new red brick affair that the Merleville people are so proud of.”
And so they lingered and talked about many a thing besides the unsightly old meeting-house—things that had happened in the old time, when the bairns were young, and the world was to them a world in which each had a kingdom to conquer, a crown to win. Those happy, happy days!
“Oh! well,” said Mrs Snow, as they rose to go up the hill again, “it’s a bonny place, and I have learnt to love it well. But if any one had told me in those days, that the time would come, when this and no other place in the world would seem like home to me, it would have been a foolishness in my ears.”