He was dead.
"Puir father," cried Donald, "he is gone just as he was beginning to rave."
Here is a touching funeral oration.
Donald had just had the misfortune to lose on the same day his wife and his cow.
"Oh, my poor Janet," he lamented, "why have ye left me? Wha 'll gie me back my Janet?"
"Nonsense! you will soon get over it," said a friend, "times cures every ill. You'll marry again by-and-by."
"It may be, I dinna say no; but wha 'll gie me back my Janet?"
Janet, as the reader may have divined, was the name of the "coo."