So in the day when Yabel McQuhirr defied his Maker and hardened his heart, God sent unto him His mercy in the shape of a young child. Then, after the grave had claimed its dead, the heart of Yabel was wondrously softened, and these two dwelt on in the empty house in great content. And in the rescued Book, with its charred calf-skin cover, the old man reads to the boy morning and evening the story of One Other who came to sinful men in the likeness of a Young Child. But though his heart takes comfort in the record, Yabel never can bring himself to read aloud that verse which says: "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these ... ye did it unto Me."
"I am not worthy. He can never mean Yabel McQuhirr," he says, and shuts the Book.
THE LASS IN THE SHOP
In Galloway, if you find an eldest son of the same name as his father, search the mother's face for the marks of a tragedy. An eldest son is rarely called by his father's Christian name, and when he is, usually there is a little grave down in the kirkyard or a name that is seldom spoken in the house—a dead Abel or a wandering Cain, at any rate a first-born that was—and is not.
Now I am called Alexander McQuhirr. My father also is Alexander McQuhirr. And the reason is that a link has dropped out. I remember the day I found out that you could make my mother jump by coming quietly behind her and calling "Willie." It was Willie McArthur I was after—he had come over from Whinnyliggate to play with me. We were busy at "hide-and-seek."
"Willie!" I cried, sharp as one who would wake an echo.
My mother dropped a bowl and caught at her side.
It is only recently that she told me the whole story.
The truth was that with twelve years between our ages and Willie away most of the time, I had no particular reason to remember my elder brother. For years before I was born my mother had been compassionated with by the good wives of the neighbourhood, proud nursing mothers of ten or eleven, because she could boast of but one chicken in her brood. She has confessed to me what she suffered on that account. And though now I have younger brothers and the reproach was wiped away in time, there are certain Job's comforters whom my mother has never forgiven.
She would be sure to spoil Willie,—one child in a house was always spoilt. So the tongues went ding-dong. It was foolish to send him to school at Cairn Edward, throwing away good siller, instead of keeping him at home to single the turnips. Thus and thus was the reproach of my mother's reluctant maternity rubbed in—and to this day the rubbers are not forgotten. It will be time enough to forgive them, thinks my mother, when she comes to lie on her death-bed.