And now it seemed to him that when he was in the garden Duncan was nearer him.  He could see the little figure in a blue jersey marching along the paths with a wheelbarrow, very important because he was helping his father.  He had called the big clump of azaleas “the burning bush.” ...  He had always been a funny little chap.

And it was in the garden that he had said good-bye to him that last time.  He had been twice wounded, and it was hard to go back again.  There was no novelty about it now, no eagerness or burning zeal, nothing but a dogged determination to see the thing through.  They had stood together looking over Tweed to the blue ridge of Cademuir and Duncan had broken the silence with a question: 

“What’s the psalm, Father, about the man ’who going forth doth mourn’?”

And with his eyes fixed on the hills the old minister had repeated: 

  “’That man who bearing precious seed
      In going forth doth mourn,
    He, doubtless, bringing back the sheaves
      Rejoicing will return.’”

And Duncan had nodded his head and said, “That’s it.  ’Rejoicing will return.’” And he had taken another long look at Cademuir.

Many wondered what had kept such a man as John Macdonald all his life in a small town like Priorsford.  He did more good, he said, in a little place; he would be of no use in a city; but the real reason was he knew his health would not stand the strain.  For many years he had been a martyr to a particularly painful kind of rheumatism.  He never spoke of it if he could help it, and tried never to let it interfere with his work, but his eyes had the patient look that suffering brings, and his face often wore a twisted, humorous smile, as if he were laughing at his own pain.  He was now sixty-four.  His sons, so far as they were allowed, had smoothed the way for their parents, but they could not induce their father to retire from the ministry.  “I’ll give up when I begin to feel myself a nuisance,” he would say.  “I can still preach and visit my people, and perhaps God will let me die in harness, with the sound of Tweed in my ears.”

Mrs. Macdonald was, in Bible words, a “succourer of many.”  She was a little stout woman with the merry heart that goes all the way, combined with heavy-lidded, sad eyes, and a habit of sighing deeply.  She affected to take a sad view of everything, breaking into irrepressible laughter in the middle of the most pessimistic utterances, for she was able to see the humorous side of her own gloom.  Mrs. Macdonald was a born giver; everything she possessed she had to share.  She was miserable if she had nothing to bestow on a parting guest, small gifts like a few new-laid eggs or a pot of home-made jam.

“You know yourself,” she would say, “what a satisfied feeling it gives you to come away from a place with even the tiniest gift.”