Note 2 — LETTER LXV.

But I want to finish my letter for this time with a word or two more of my Scottish Amorite aunt, after she was brought down into Lowland life by her practical tanner. She, a pure dark-eyed dove-priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland Dodona.2 Strangely, the kitchen servant-of-all-work in the house at Rose Terrace was a very old “Mause” who might well have been the prototype of the Mause of ‘Old Mortality,’3 but had even a more solemn, fearless, and patient faith, fastened in her by extreme suffering; for she had been nearly starved to death when she was a girl, and had literally picked the bones out of cast-out dust-heaps to gnaw; and ever afterwards, to see the waste of an atom of food was as shocking to her as blasphemy. “Oh, Miss Margaret!” she said once to my mother, who had shaken some crumbs off a dirty plate out of the window, “I had rather you had knocked me down.” She would make her dinner upon anything in the house that the other servants wouldn’t eat;—often upon potato skins, giving her own dinner away to any poor person she saw; and would always stand during the whole church service, (though at least seventy years old when I knew her, and very feeble,) if she could persuade any wild Amorite out of the streets to take her seat. Her wrinkled and worn face, moveless in resolution, and patience; incapable of smile, and knit sometimes perhaps too severely against Jessie and me, if we wanted more creamy milk to our porridge, or jumped off our favourite box on Sunday,—(‘Never mind, John,’ said Jessie to me, once, seeing me in an unchristian state of provocation on this subject, ‘when we’re married, we’ll jump off boxes all day long, if we like!’) may have been partly instrumental in giving me that slight bias against the Evangelical religion which I confess to be sometimes traceable in my later works: but I never can be thankful enough for having seen, in her, the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force; and been enabled therefore afterwards to trace its agency in the reforming policy of Scotland with the reverence and honour it deserves.