Witch Wood. Buchan John
legs. Ye’ve had a sair winter and your face is like a dish-clout. Awa’ and snowk up the caller air.’
David went out to the moors, and on the summit of the Hill of Deer had a prospect of the countryside, the contours sharp in the clear April light, and colour stealing back after the grey of winter. The Wood of Melanudrigill seemed to have crowded together again, and to have regained its darkness, but there was as yet no mystery in its shadows. The hill itself was yellow like old velvet, but green was mantling beside the brimming streams. The birches were still only a pale vapour, but there were buds on the saughs and the hazels. Remnants of old drifts lay behind the dykes, and on the Lammer Law there was a great field of snow, but the breeze blew soft and the crying of curlews and plovers told of the spring. Up on Windyways and at the back of Reiverslaw the heather was burning, and spirals of blue smoke rose to the pale skies.
The sight was a revelation to a man to whom Spring had come hitherto in the narrow streets of Edinburgh. He had a fancy that life was beating furiously under the brown earth, and that he was in the presence of a miracle. His youth, long frosted by winter, seemed to return to him and his whole being to thaw. Almost shamefacedly he acknowledged an uplift of spirit. The smoke from the moorburn was like the smoke of sacrifice on ancient altars—innocent sacrifice from kindly altars.
That night in his study he found that he could not bring his mind to his commentary on the prophet Isaiah. His thoughts ranged on other things, and he would fain have opened his Virgil. But, since these evening hours were dedicate to theology, he compromised with Clement of Alexandria, and read again the passage where that father of the Church becomes a poet and strives to mingle the classic and the Christian.—‘This is the Mountain beloved of God, not a place of tragedies like Cithaeron, but consecrate to the dramas of truth, a mount of temperance shaded with the groves of purity. And there revel on it not the Maenads, sisters of Semele the thunderstruck, initiate in the impure feast of flesh, but God’s daughters, fair Lambs who celebrate the holy rites of the Word, chanting soberly in chorus.’
In these days his sermons changed. He no longer hammered subtle chains of doctrine, but forsook his ‘ordinary,’ and preached to the hearts of the people. Woodilee was in turn mystified, impressed, and disquieted. One bright afternoon he discoursed on thankfulness and the praise due to God. ‘Praise Him,’ he cried, ‘if you have no more, for this good day and sunshine to the lambs.’
‘Heard ye ever the like?’ said Mirehope at the kirk door. ‘What concern has Jehovah wi’ our lambin’?’
‘He’s an affectionate preacher,’ said Chasehope, ‘but he’s no Boanerges, like Proudfoot o’ Bold.’
The other agreed, and though the tone of the two men was regretful, their eyes were content, as if they had no wish for a Boanerges in Woodilee.
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