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"Would you mind letting the flag fly, Alister? I should have something to look at!" "I will; and when I want particularly to see you, I will haul it down. Then, if you hang a handkerchief from your window, I will come to you." For the first winter the Clanruadh had not much to fear hardly more than usual: they had their small provision of potatoes and meal, and some a poor trifle of money.
Alister could not, at his years, have generated such thoughts but for the wisdom that had gone before him first the large-minded speculation of his father, who was capable even of discarding his prejudices where he saw they might mislead him; and next, the response of his mother to the same: she was the only one who entirely understood her husband.
"Then, Alister, do you not see that the love of our mother earth is meant to be but a beginning; and that such love as yours for the land belongs to that love of things which must perish? You seem to me not to allow it to blossom, but to keep it a hard bud; and a bud that will not blossom is a coffin.
"I was thinking," returned Alister, "that as you did not know I was watching you, so, when we feel as if God were nowhere, he is watching over us with an eternal consciousness, above and beyond our every hope and fear, untouched by the varying faith and fluctuating moods of his children."
I said so, and added that what little money I had was to be regarded as a common purse so long as it lasted. When Alister was appealed to, he cast in his lot with no less willingness, but it seemed that he must first look up a relation of his mother's, who lived in Halifax, and to whom his mother had given him a letter of introduction.
When he astonished them by entering as they sat at breakfast, and told them how he had passed the night, it thrilled Mercy's heart to know that, while she slept and was dreaming about him, he was awake and thinking about her. "What is only dreaming in me, is thinking in you, Alister!" she said.
"Will you go with him, Mercy?" she asked, laying her hand on hers. "I would rather be his servant," answered Mercy, "than remain at home: there is no life there!" "There is life wherever there is the will to live that is, to do the thing that is given one to do," said the mother. In writing she told Alister nothing of what had happened: he might hurry home without completing his business!
He and his engineer friend were both good shots, and they had made an expedition on purpose to get these birds for Alister. There were some most splendid specimens, and the grandest of all, to my thinking, was a Roseate Spoonbill, a wading, fish-catching bird of all shades of rose, from pale pink to crimson. Even his long horny legs were red.
I have not once tasted anything VERY nice since the letter that made my father so angry." "You darling!" Of all men a highlander understands independence of the KIND of food. "But," continued Alister, "you need not go on with it; I am quite convinced; and we must take with thanksgiving what God gives us. Besides, you have to grow yet!" "Alister! and me like a May-pole!"
Whether there was enough in Alister to have met and overcome the spirit of the world, had he been brought up at Oxford or Cambridge, I have not to determine; there was that in him at least which would have come to, repent bitterly had he yielded; but brought up as he was, he was not only able to entertain the exalted idea presented to him, but to receive and make it his.
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