'
'Because you were doing good, Robert, my boy; and I who had done so
little had no right to interrupt what you were doing. I wonder if
God will give me another chance. I would fain do better. I don't
think I could sit singing psalms to all eternity,' he added with a
smile.
'Whatever good I may do afore my turn comes, I hae you to thank for
't. Eh, doctor, gin it hadna been for you!'
Robert's feelings overcame him. He resumed, brokenly,
'Ye gae me a man to believe in, whan my ain father had forsaken me,
and my frien' was awa to God. Ye hae made me, doctor. Wi' meat an'
drink an' learnin' an' siller, an' a'thing at ance, ye hae made me.'
'Eh, Robert!' said the dying man, half rising on his elbow, 'to
think what God maks us a' to ane anither! My father did ten times
for me what I hae dune for you. As I lie here thinkin' I may see
him afore a week's ower, I'm jist a bairn again.'
As he spoke, the polish of his speech was gone, and the social
refinement of his countenance with it. The face of his ancestors,
the noble, sensitive, heart-full, but rugged, bucolic, and
weather-beaten through centuries of windy ploughing, hail-stormed
sheep-keeping, long-paced seed-sowing, and multiform labour, surely
not less honourable in the sight of the working God than the
fighting of the noble, came back in the face of the dying physician.
>From that hour to his death he spoke the rugged dialect of his
fathers.
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