Presently she leaned over me and took down the burnt Bible out of the wall aumry.
'Here, Launce,' she said, 'read you the chapter this night ere ye sleep. It becomes a man wedded and the head of a family. Besides, your father is from home.'
I declare I would sooner have charged upon the level spears. But I had no choice with my mother, speaking as she did when I was a boy, and my Nell sitting there crossing her pretty ankles by the fireside. So I manned to read a portion. It was about Jonathan clambering up a rock (and a good soldier he was). But the prayer fairly beat me. However, ere we rose from our knees we said the Lord's prayer all of us together. So to rest we went, without other word spoken. And through the little window of the room in which I was born, Nell and I could hear, ere we went to sleep, the brattle of the burn hurrying down through the peace of the hills, past our own new house of Palgowan and so on toward the silence of the outermost sea.
THE END
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