“Ye’ve ta’en a note o’ the sermon, lad?” said the mistress. “I will see it when we get our dinner.”
After dinner, and after the soldier had read the chapter of which the text formed part, in the same correct and eloquent style as he did in the morning, Mrs Lyall asked him to “favour her with a sight of the sermon.” After adjusting her spectacles, Mrs Lyall examined with seeming seriousness the manuscript, page after page, glancing a look now and then at the soldier and her husband. She took off her specks, and handing back the sheets to the soldier, said—
“Weel, lad, ye are the best reader that ever I heard, an’ the warst writer I ever saw; there’s naething there but dots an’ strokes an’ tirliewhirlies; I canna mak a word o’ sense o’t; ye’ve sairly neglected yer handwrite—sairly.”
“That may be,” replied the soldier, “but I can assure you the sermon is all there.”
“Ye can read it yoursel, then,” said the gudewife.
The soldier took the manuscript and read, or rather re-delivered, the sermon, each head and particular, word for word as Mr Harper had given it. When he had concluded it, David Lyall, looking triumphantly at the mistress, said—
“Weel, gudewife, ye’ve gotten the sermon to Amen. Fat think ye o’ that?”
She sat in silent amazement for a considerable time, and at length ejaculated—“Fat do I think o’ that? Fat do I think o’ that? Fa’ wadna think o’ that? I may just say this, that I never believed before that a red coat had sae muckle grace about it, but I’ve been thinkin’, lad, that ye are no a sodger—at ony rate if ye are ane, ye could be something else,—I’m doon sure o’ that.”
The soldier stated that he was only a private soldier, that there was nothing extraordinary in what he had done, that all or nearly all the men in his regiment could just do the same thing, and that many of them were better scholars than he pretended to be; and taking from his knapsack a copy of the Greek New Testament, he laid it before her, saying that “as she had been so kind as allow him to read her Bible, he would favour her with a look of his, and hoped that she would now in turn read for his edification.”
Mrs Lyall examined the volume with deep attention for some time, and shaking her head, said—