THE MAN FROM GLENGARRY
stirring up a man's feelin's like that? Seem to be not a bad sort, either," he added, meditatively.
"Indeed, they are good men," said Macdonald Bhain, "but they will not be knowing Mack as I knew him. He never made any profession at all, but he had the root of the matter in him."
Ranald felt as if he had wakened out of a terrible nightmare, and followed his uncle into the house, with a happier heart than he had known since he had received Yankee's letter.
As they entered the room where the people were gathered, Donald Ross was reading the hundred and third psalm, and the words of love and pity and sympathy were dropping from his kindly lips like healing balm upon the mourning hearts, and as they rose and fell upon the cadences of "Coleshill," the tune Straight Rory always chose for this psalm, the healing sank down into all the sore places, and the peace that passeth understanding began to take possession of them.
Softly and sweetly they sang, the old women swaying with the music:
"For, as the heaven in its height
The earth surmounteth far,
So great to those that do him fear,
His tender mercies are."
When they reached that verse, the mother took up the song and went bravely on through the words of the following verse:
"As far as east is distant from
The west, so far hath he
From us removed, in his love,
All our iniquity."
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