P.S. What about my being confirmed next term? Do you think I need? I don’t feel much like it at present and Taboret Major isn’t going to be because he’s going to join the Scotch religion. I expect I shall be converted when I’m in Scotland, so had I better wait to see? But then I ought to say that Taboret Major is going to wear a kilt. I expect this makes a difference. What do you think?
So even Dick was denied her, and Elsie went out into her garden where the borders were full of blossoms which Diana loved, and into the kitchen garden where grew vegetable marrows, things which Dick had sworn he loved, and the aunt felt she had laboured in vain. She had sown and Uncle Marcus would reap.
XIII
God made the Highlander—then rested.
His finest work was never bested.
Is there any waking up in this world to be compared with the waking up in Scotland after a night spent in the train?
Is there any air so thin and clear as the air one breathes on stepping out to the station platform? Would a man be anywhere else on God’s earth? No, not if he be a sportsman and something of a Scotsman. It is not necessary to be more than that to make one eager to claim kinship with every one as one stands for the first time after many months on Scottish ground. Marcus bethought himself of the portrait of an ancestress of his wearing a tartan sash and blessed her for having worn it and for having passed on to him something of her love for the Highlands that had lain in her heart beneath the tartan band.
As Marcus stood on the platform he pointed out to Diana its many beauties. God had willed that there should be no mist that morning—and no veil hung between them and the moor—purpling with promise of deeper things to come. Diana said that, and Marcus enthused in his turn over the convolvulus that scrambled over the white wooden paling as it scrambles nowhere else: nowhere else, perhaps, is it so worth while scrambling to get over the paling.
“It’s good to be alive!” he exclaimed.
“Delicious!” said Diana, sniffing; “isn’t it good? How much longer shall we be before we get there?”