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The minister and Walter sat for a long time in the heat of the noonday regarding one another with undisguised interest. They were in the midst of a plain of moorland, over which a haze of heat hung like a diaphanous veil. Over the edge there appeared, like a plain of blue mist, the strath, with the whitewashed farmhouses glimmering up like patches of snow on a March hillside. The minister came down from the dyke and sat beside the boy on the heather clumps.

“You are a herd, you tell me. Well, so am I–I am a shepherd of men, though unworthy of such a charge,” he added.

Walter looked for further light.

“Did you ever hear,” continued Mr. Cameron, looking away over the valley, “of One who went about, almost barefoot like you, over rocky roads and up and down hillsides?”

“Ye needna tell me–I ken His name,” said Walter reverently.

“Well,” continued the minister, “would you not like to be a herd like Him, and look after men and not sheep?”

“Sheep need to be lookit after as weel,” said Walter.

“But sheep have no souls to be saved!” said Richard Cameron.

“Dowgs hae!” asserted Walter stoutly.

“What makes you say so?” said the minister indulgently. He was out for a holiday.

“Because, if my dowg Royal hasna a soul, there’s a heap o’ fowk gangs to the kirk withoot!”

“What does Royal do that makes you think that he has a soul?” asked the minister.

“Weel, for ae thing, he gangs to the kirk every Sabbath, and lies in the passage, an’ he’ll no as muckle as snack at a flee that lichts on his nose–a thing he’s verra fond o’ on a week day. An’ if it’s no’ yersel’ that’s preachin’, my gran’faither says that he’ll rise an’ gang oot till the sermon’s by.”

The minister felt keenly the implied compliment.

“And mair nor that, he disna haud wi’ repeating tunes,” said Walter, who, though a boy, knew the name of every tune in the psalmody–for that was one of the books which could with safety be looked at under the bookboard when the minister was laying down his “fifthly,” and when some one had put leaden clogs on the hands of the little yellow-faced clock in the front of the gallery–a clock which in the pauses of the sermon could be heard ticking distinctly, with a staidness and devotion to the matter in hand which were quite Cameronian.

“Repeating tunes!” said the minister, with a certain painful recollection of a storm in his session on the Thursday after the precentor had set up “Artaxerxes” in front of him and sung it as a solo without a single member of the congregation daring to join.

“Ay,” said Walter, “Royal disna hand wi’ repeats. He yowls like fun. But ‘Kilmarnock’ and ‘Martyrs’ fit him fine. He thumps the passage boards wi’ his tail near as loud’s ye do the Bible yersel’. Mair than that, Royal gangs for the kye every nicht himsel’. A’ that ye hae to say is juist ‘Kye, Royal–gae fetch them!’ an’ he’s aff like a shot.”

“How does he open the gates?” queried the minister.

“He lifts the bars wi’ his nose, but he canna sneck them ahint him when he comes back.”

“And you think that he has a soul?” said the minister, to draw the boy out.

“What think ye yersel’, sir?” said Walter, who at bottom was a true Scot, and could always answer one question by asking another.

“Well,” answered the minister, making a great concession, “the Bible tells us nothing of the future of the beasts that perish–“

“Who knoweth,” said Walter, “the soul of the beast, whether it goeth upward or whether it goeth downward to the ground?”

The minister took his way over the moor, crossing the wide peat-hags and the deep trenches from which the neighbouring farmers of bygone generations had cut the peat for their winter fires. He went with a long swinging step very light and swift, springing from tussock to tussock of dried brown bent in the marshy places.