"I made that sun-dial. Rab Affleck showed me," he said simply, without any of the pride of genius.
"And are ye sure that the working hour is always the same length as the reading time?" asked the minister.
Walter looked up with a bright twinkle in his eye.
"Whiles when I'm workin' at the thistles, she may get a bit kick forrit," he said.
The minister laughed a low, mellow laugh. Then he quoted a text, as was customary with him:
"'And Hezekiah said, It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees in the dial of Ahaz.'"
The minister and Walter sat for a long time in the heat of the noonday regarding one another with undisguised interest. They were in the midst of a plain of moorland, over which a haze of heat hung like a diaphanous veil. Over the edge there appeared, like a plain of blue mist, the strath, with the whitewashed farmhouses glimmering up like patches of snow on a March hillside. The minister came down from the dyke and sat beside the boy on the heather clumps.
"You are a herd, you tell me. Well, so am I—I am a shepherd of men, though unworthy of such a charge," he added.
Walter looked for further light.
"Did you ever hear," continued Mr. Cameron, looking away over the valley, "of One who went about, almost barefoot like you, over rocky roads and up and down hillsides?"