The Wow O' Rivven
By George MacDonald
 
ELSIE SCOTT had let her work fall on her knees, and her hands on her work, and 
was looking out of the wide, low window of her room, which was on one of the 
ground floors of the village street. Through a gap in the household shrubbery of 
fuchsias and myrtles filling the window-sill, one passing on the foot pavement 
might get a momentary glimpse of her pale face, lighted up with two blue eyes, 
over which some inward trouble had spread a faint, gauze-like haziness. But 
almost before her thoughts had had time to wander back to this trouble, a shout 
of children's voices, at the other end of the street, reached her ear. She 
listened a moment. A shadow of displeasure and pain crossed her countenance; and 
rising hastily, she betook herself to an inner apartment, and closed the door 
behind her.
Meantime the sounds drew nearer; and by and by an old man, whose strange 
appearance and dress showed that he had little capacity either for good or evil, 
passed the window. His clothes were comfortable enough in quality and condition, 
for they were the annual gift of a benevolent lady in the neighbourhood; but, 
being made to accommodate his taste, both known and traditional, they were 
somewhat peculiar in cut and adornment. Both coat and trousers were of a dark 
grey cloth; but the former, which, in its shape, partook of the military, had a 
straight collar of yellow, and narrow cuffs of the same; while upon both 
sleeves, about the place where a corporal wears his stripes, was expressed, in 
the same yellow cloth, a somewhat singular device. It was as close an imitation 
of a bell, with its tongue hanging out of its mouth, as the tailor's skill could 
produce from a single piece of cloth. The origin of the military cut of his coat 
was well known. His preference for it arose in the time of the wars of the first 
Napoleon, when the threatened invasion of the country caused the organisation of 
many volunteer regiments. The martial show and exercises captivated the poor 
man's fancy; and from that time forward nothing pleased his vanity, and 
consequently conciliated his goodwill more, than to style him by his favourite 
title-the Colonel. But the badge on his arm had a deeper origin, which will be 
partially manifest in the course of the story-if story it can be called. It was, 
indeed, the baptism of the fool, the outward and visible sign of his relation to 
the infinite and unseen. His countenance, however, although the features were 
not of any peculiarly low or animal type, showed no corresponding sign of the 
consciousness of such a relation, being as vacant as human countenance could 
well be.
The cause of Elsie's annoyance was that the fool was annoyed; he was followed by 
a troop of boys, who turned his rank into scorn, and assailed him with epithets 
hateful to him. Although the most harmless of creatures when left alone, he was 
dangerous when roused; and now he stooped repeatedly to pick up stones and hurl 
them at his tormentors, who took care, while abusing him, to keep at a 
considerable distance, lest he should get hold of them. Amidst the sounds of 
derision that followed him, might be heard the words frequently repeated-"Come 
hame, come hame." But in a few minutes the noise ceased, either from the 
interference of some friendly inhabitant, or that the boys grew weary, and 
departed in search of other amusement. By and by, Elsie might be seen again at 
her work in the window; but the cloud over her eyes was deeper, and her whole 
face more sad.
Indeed, so much did the persecution of this poor man affect her, that an 
onlooker would have been compelled to seek the cause in some yet deeper sympathy 
than that commonly felt for the oppressed, even by women. And such a sympathy 
existed, strange as it may seem, between the beautiful girl (for many called her 
a bonnie lassie) and this "tatter of humanity". Nothing would have been farther 
from the thoughts of those that knew them, than the supposition of any 
correspondence or connection between them; yet this sympathy sprang in part from 
a real similarity in their history and present condition.
All the facts that were known about Feel Jock's origin were these: that seventy 
years ago, a man who had gone with his horse and cart some miles from the 
village, to fetch home a load of peat from a desolate moss, had heard, while 
toiling along as rough a road on as lonely a hillside as any in Scotland, the 
cry of a child; and, searching about, had found the infant, hardly wrapt in 
rags, and untended, as if the earth herself had just given birth-that desert 
moor, wide and dismal, broken and watery, the only bosom for him to lie upon, 
and the cold, clear night-heaven his only covering. The man had brought him 
home, and the parish had taken parish-care of him. He had grown up, and proved 
what he now was-almost an idiot. Many of the townspeople were kind to him, and 
employed him in fetching water for them from the river or wells in the 
neighbourhood, paying him for his trouble in victuals, or whisky, of which he 
was very fond. He seldom spoke; and the sentences he could utter were few; yet 
the tone, and even the words of his limited vocabulary, were sufficient to 
express gratitude and some measure of love towards those who were kind to him, 
and hatred of those who teased and insulted him. He lived a life without aim, 
and apparently to no purpose; in this resembling most of his more gifted 
fellow-men, who, with all the tools and materials necessary for building a noble 
mansion, are yet content with a clay hut.
Elsie, on the contrary, had been born in a comfortable farmhouse, amidst 
homeliness and abundance. But at a very early age she had lost both father and 
mother; not so early, however, but that she had faint memories of warm soft 
times on her mother's bosom, and of refuge in her mother's arms from the attacks 
of geese, and the pursuit of pigs. Therefore, in after-times, when she looked 
forward to heaven, it was as much a reverting to the old heavenly times of 
childhood and mother's love, as an anticipation of something yet to be revealed. 
Indeed, without some such memory, how should we ever picture to ourselves a 
perfect rest? But sometimes it would seem as if the more a heart was made 
capable of loving, the less it had to love; and poor Elsie, in passing from a 
mother's to a brother's guardianship, felt a change of spiritual temperature too 
keen. He was not a bad man, or incapable of benevolence when touched by the 
sight of want in anything of which he would himself have felt the privation; but 
he was so coarsely made that only the purest animal necessities affected him, 
and a hard word, or unfeeling speech, could never have reached the quick of his 
nature through the hide that enclosed it. Elsie, on the contrary, was 
excessively and painfully sensitive, as if her nature constantly portended an 
invisible multitude of half-spiritual, half-nervous antenna, which shrank and 
trembled in every current of air at all below their own temperature. The effect 
of this upon her behaviour was such that she was called odd; and the poor girl 
felt she was not like other people, yet could not help it. Her brother, too, 
laughed at her without the slightest idea of the pain he occasioned, or the 
remotest feeling of curiosity as to what the inward and consistent causes of the 
outward abnormal condition might be. Tenderness was the divine comforting she 
needed; and it was altogether absent from her brother's character and behaviour.
Her neighbours looked on her with some interest, but they rather shunned than 
courted her acquaintance; especially after the return of certain nervous 
attacks, to which she had been subject in childhood, and which were again 
brought on by the events I must relate. It is curious how certain diseases 
repel, by a kind of awe, the sympathies of the neighbours: as if, by the fact of 
being subject to them, the patient were removed into another realm of existence, 
from which, like the dead with the living, she can hold communion with those 
around her only partially, and with a mixture of dread pervading the 
intercourse. Thus some of the deepest, purest wells of spiritual life, are, like 
those in old castles, choked up by the decay of the outer walls. But what tended 
more than anything, perhaps, to keep up the painful unrest of her soul (for the 
beauty of her character was evident in the fact that the irritation seldom 
reached her mind), was a circumstance at which, in its present connection, some 
of my readers will smile, and others feel a shudder corresponding in kind to 
that of Elsie.
Her brother was very fond of a rather small, but ferocious-looking bull-dog, 
which followed close at his heels, wherever he went, with hanging head and 
slouching gait, never leaping or racing about like other dogs. When in the 
house, he always lay under his master's chair. He seemed to dislike Elsie, and 
she felt an unspeakable repugnance to him. Though she never mentioned her 
aversion, her brother easily saw it by the way in which she avoided the animal; 
and attributing it entirely to fear-which indeed had a great share in the 
matter-he would cruelly aggravate it, by telling her stories of the fierce 
hardihood and relentless persistency of this kind of animal. He dared not yet 
further increase her terror by offering to set the creature upon her, because it 
was doubtful whether he might be able to restrain him; but the mental suffering 
which he occasioned by this heartless conduct, and for which he had no sympathy, 
was as severe as many bodily sufferings to which he would have been sorry to 
subject her. Whenever the poor girl happened inadvertently to pass near the dog, 
which was seldom, a low growl made her aware of his proximity, and drove her to 
a quick retreat. He was, in fact, the animal impersonation of the animal 
opposition which she had continually to endure. Like chooses like; and the 
bulldog in her brother made choice of the bull-dog out of him for his companion. 
So her day was one of shrinking fear and multiform discomfort.
But a nature capable of so much distress, must of necessity be capable of a 
corresponding amount of pleasure; and in her case this was manifest in the fact 
that sleep and the quiet of her own room restored her wonderfully. If she were 
only let alone, a calm mood, filled with images of pleasure, soon took 
possession of her mind.
Her acquaintance with the fool had commenced some ten years previous to the time 
I write of, when she was quite a little girl, and had come from the country with 
her brother, who, having taken a small farm close to the town, preferred 
residing in the town to occupying the farmhouse, which was not comfortable. She 
looked at first with some terror on his uncouth appearance, and with much 
wonderment on his strange dress. This wonder was heightened by a conversation 
she overheard one day in the street, between the fool and a little pale-faced 
boy, who, approaching him respectfully, said, "Weel, cornel!" "Weel, laddie!" 
was the reply. "Fat dis the wow say, cornel?" "Come hame, come hame! " answered 
the colonel, with both accent and quantity heaped on the word hame. What the wow 
could be, she had no idea; only, as the years passed on, the strange word became 
in her mind indescribably associated with the strange shape in yellow cloth on 
his sleeves. Had she been a native of the town, she could not have failed to 
know its import, so familiar was every one with it, although it did not belong 
to the local vocabulary; but, as it was, years passed away before she discovered 
its meaning. And when, again and again, the fool, attempting to convey his 
gratitude for some kindness she had shown him mumbled over the words-"The wow o' 
Rivven-the wow o' Rivven," the wonder would return as to what could be the idea 
associated with them in his mind, but she made no advance towards their 
explanation.
That, however, which most attracted her to the old man, was his persecution by 
the children. They were to him what the bull-dog was to her-the constant source 
of irritation and annoyance. They could hardly hurt him, nor did he appear to 
dread other injury from them than insult, to which, fool though he was, he was 
keenly alive. Human gadflies that they were! they sometimes stung him beyond 
endurance, and he would curse them in the impotence of his anger. Once or twice 
Elsie had been so far carried beyond her constitutional timidity, by sympathy 
for the distress of her friend, that she had gone out and talked to the 
boys-even scolded them, so that they slunk away ashamed, and began to stand as 
much in dread of her as of the clutches of their prey. So she, gentle and timid 
to excess, acquired among them the reputation of a termagant. Popular opinion 
among children, as among men, is often just, but as often very unjust; for the 
same manifestations may proceed from opposite principles; and, therefore, as 
indices to character, may mislead as often as enlighten.
Next door to the house in which Elsie resided, dwelt a tradesman and his wife, 
who kept an indefinite sort of shop, in which various kinds of goods were 
exposed for sale. Their youngest son was about the same age as Elsie; and while 
they were rather more than children, and less than young people, he spent many 
of his evenings with her, somewhat to the loss of position in his classes at the 
parish school. They were, indeed, much attached to each other; and, peculiarly 
constituted as Elsie was, one may imagine what kind of heavenly messenger a 
companion stronger than herself must have been to her. In fact, if she could 
have framed the undefinable need of her childlike nature into an articulate 
prayer, it would have been-"Give me some one to love me stronger than I." Any 
love was helpful, yes, in its degree, saving to her poor troubled soul; but the 
hope, as they grew older together, that the powerful, yet tender-hearted youth, 
really loved her, and would one day make her his wife, was like the opening of 
heavenly eyes of life and love in the hitherto blank and deathlike face of her 
existence. But nothing had been said of love, although they met and parted like 
lovers.
Doubtless, if the circles of their thought and feeling had continued as now to 
intersect each other, there would have been no interruption to their affection; 
but the time at length arrived when the old couple, seeing the rest of their 
family comfortably settled in life, resolved to make a gentleman of the 
youngest; and so sent him from school to college. The facilities existing in 
Scotland for providing a professional training enabled them to educate him as a 
surgeon. He parted from Elsie with some regret; but, far less dependent on her 
than she was on him, and full of the prospects of the future, he felt none of 
that sinking at the heart which seemed to lay her whole nature open to a fresh 
inroad of all the terrors and sorrows of her peculiar existence. No 
correspondence took place between them. New pursuits and relations, and the 
development of his tastes and judgments, entirely altered the position of poor 
Elsie in his memory. Having been, during their intercourse, far less of a man 
than she of a woman, he had no definite idea of the place he had occupied in her 
regard; and in his mind she receded into the background of the past, without his 
having any idea that she would suffer thereby, or that he was unjust towards 
her; while, in her thoughts, his image stood in the highest and clearest relief. 
It was the centre-point from which and towards which all lines radiated and 
converged; and although she could not but be doubtful about the future, yet 
there was much hope mingled with her doubts.
But when, at the close of two years, he visited his native village, and she saw 
before her, instead of the homely youth who had left her that winter evening, 
one who, to her inexperienced eyes, appeared a finished gentleman, her heart 
sank within her, as if she had found Nature herself false in her ripening 
processes, destroying the beautiful promise of a former year by changing instead 
of developing her creations. He spoke kindly to her, but not cordially. To her 
ear the voice seemed to come from a great distance out of the past; and while 
she looked upon him, that optical change passed over her vision, which all have 
experienced after gazing abstractedly on any object for a time: his form grew 
very small, and receded to an immeasurable distance; till, her imagination 
mingling with the twilight haze of her senses, she seemed to see him standing 
far off on a hill, with the bright horizon of sunset for a background to his 
clearly defined figure.
She knew no more till she found herself in bed in the dark; and the first 
message that reached her from the outer world was the infernal growl of the 
bull-dog from the room below. Next day she saw her lover walking with two 
ladies, who would have thought it some degree of condescension to speak to her; 
and he passed the house without once looking towards it.
One who is sufficiently possessed by the demon of nervousness to be glad of the 
magnetic influences of a friend's company in a public promenade, or of a horse 
beneath him in passing through a churchyard, will have some faint idea of how 
utterly exposed and defenceless poor Elsie now felt on the crowded thoroughfare 
of life. And so the insensibility which had overtaken her, was not the ordinary 
swoon with which Nature relieves the overstrained nerves, but the return of the 
epileptic fits of her early childhood; and if the condition of the poor girl had 
been pitiable before, it was tenfold more so now. Yet she did not complain, but 
bore all in silence, though it was evident that her health was giving way. But 
now, help came to her from a strange quarter; though many might not be willing 
to accord the name of help to that which rather hastened than retarded the 
progress of her decline.
She had gone to spend a few of the summer days with a relative in the country, 
some miles from her home, if home it could be called. One evening, towards 
sunset, she went out for a solitary walk. Passing from the little garden gate, 
she went along a bare country road for some distance, and then, turning aside by 
a footpath through a thicket of low trees, she came out in a lonely little 
churchyard on the hillside. Hardly knowing whether or not she had intended to go 
there, she seated herself on a mound covered with long grass, one of many. 
Before her stood the ruins of an old church which was taking centuries to 
crumble. Little remained but the gable wall, immensely thick, and covered with 
ancient ivy. The rays of the setting sun fell on a mound at its foot, not green 
like the rest, but of a rich red-brown in the rosy sunset, and evidently but 
newly heaped up. Her eyes, too, rested upon it. Slowly the sun sank below the 
near horizon.
As the last brilliant point disappeared, the ivy darkened, and a wind arose and 
shook all its leaves, making them look cold and troubled; and to Elsie's ear 
came a low faint sound, as from a far-off bell. But close beside her-and she 
started and shivered at the sound-rose a deep, monotonous, almost sepulchral 
voice, "Come hame, come hame! The wow, the wow!"
At once she understood the whole. She sat in the churchyard of the ancient 
parish church of Ruthven; and when she lifted up her eyes, there she saw, in the 
half-ruined belfry, the old bell, all but hidden with ivy, which the passing 
wind had roused to utter one sleepy tone; and there beside her, stood the fool 
with the bell on his arm; and to him and to her the wow o' Rivven said, "Come 
hame, come hame!" Ah, what did she want in the whole universe of God but a home? 
And though the ground beneath was hard, and the sky overhead far and boundless, 
and the hillside lonely and companionless, yet somewhere within the visible and 
beyond these the outer surface of creation, there might be a home for her; as 
round the wintry house the snows lie heaped up cold and white and dreary all the 
long forenight, while within, beyond the closed shutters, and giving no glimmer 
through the thick stone wall, the fires are blazing joyously, and the voice and 
laughter of young unfrozen children are heard, and nothing belongs to winter but 
the grey hairs on the heads of the parents, within whose warm hearts childlike 
voices are heard, and childlike thoughts move to and fro. The kernel of winter 
itself is spring, or a sleeping summer.
It was no wonder that the fool, cast out of the earth on a far more desolate 
spot than this, should seek to return within her bosom at this place of open 
doors, and should call it home. For surely the surface of the earth had no home 
for him. The mound at the foot of the gable contained the body of one who had 
shown him kindness. He had followed the funeral that afternoon from the town, 
and had remained behind with the bell. Indeed it was his custom, though Elsie 
had not known it, to follow every funeral going to this, his favourite 
churchyard of Ruthven; and, possibly in imitation of its booming, for it was 
still tolled at the funerals, he had given the old bell the name of the wow, and 
had translated its monotonous clangour into the articulate sounds-come hame, 
come hame. What precise meaning he attached to the words, it is impossible to 
say; but it was evident that the place possessed a strange attraction for him, 
drawing him towards it by the cords of some spiritual magnetism. It is possible 
that in the mind of the idiot there may have been some feeling about this 
churchyard and bell, which, in the mind of another, would have become a grand 
poetic thought; a feeling as if the ghostly old bell hung at the church door of 
the invisible world, and ever and anon rung out joyous notes (though they 
sounded sad in the ears of the living), calling to the children of the unseen to 
come home, come home. She sat for some time in silence; for the bell did not 
ring again, and the fool spoke no more; till the dews began to fall, when she 
rose and went home, followed by her companion, who passed the night in the barn. 
From that hour Elsie was furnished with a visual image of the rest she sought; 
an image which, mingling with deeper and holier thoughts, became, like the bow 
set in the cloud, the earthly pledge and sign of the fulfilment of heavenly 
hopes. Often when the wintry fog of cold discomfort and homelessness filled her 
soul, all at once the picture of the little churchyard-with the old gable and 
belfry, and the slanting sunlight steeping down to the very roots of the long 
grass on the graves-arose in the darkened chamber (camera obscura) of her soul; 
and again she heard the faint Ĉolian sound of the bell, and the voice of the 
prophet-fool who interpreted the oracle; and the inward weariness was soothed by 
the promise of a long sleep. Who can tell how many have been counted fools 
simply because they were prophets; or how much of the madness in the world may 
be the utterance of thoughts true and just, but belonging to a region differing 
from ours in its nature and scenery!
But to Elsie looking out of her window came the mocking tones of the idle boys 
who had chosen as the vehicle of their scorn the very words which showed the 
relation of the fool to the eternal, and revealed in him an element higher far 
than any yet developed in them. They turned his glory into shame, like the 
enemies of David when they mocked the would-be king. And the best in a man is 
often that which is most condemned by those who have not attained to his 
goodness. The words, however, even as repeated by the boys, had not solely 
awakened indignation at the persecution of the old man: they had likewise 
comforted her with the thought of the refuge that awaited both him and her.
But the same evening a worse trial was in store for her. Again she sat near the 
window, oppressed by the consciousness that her brother had come in. He had gone 
upstairs, and his dog had remained at the door, exchanging surly compliments 
with some of his own kind, when the fool came strolling past, and, I do not know 
from what cause, the dog flew at him. Elsie heard his cry and looked up. Her 
fear of the brute vanished in a moment before her sympathy for her friend. She 
darted from the house, and rushed towards the dog to drag him off the 
defenceless idiot, calling him by his name in a tone of anger and dislike. He 
left the fool, and, springing at Elsie, seized her by the arm above the elbow 
with such a grip that, in the midst of her agony, she fancied she heard the bone 
crack. But she uttered no cry, for the most apprehensive are sometimes the most 
courageous. Just then, however, her former lover was coming along the street, 
and, catching a glimpse of what had happened, was on the spot in an instant, 
took the dog by the throat with a gripe not inferior to his own, and having thus 
compelled him to relax his hold, dashed him on the ground with a force that 
almost stunned him, and then with a superadded kick sent him away limping and 
howling; whereupon the fool, attacking him furiously with a stick, would 
certainly have finished him, had not his master descried his plight and come to 
his rescue.
Meantime the young surgeon had carried Elsie into the house; for, as soon as she 
was rescued from the dog, she had fallen down in one of her fits, which were 
becoming more and more frequent of themselves, and little needed such a shock as 
this to increase their violence. He was dressing her arm when she began to 
recover; and when she opened her eyes, in a state of half-consciousness, he 
first object she beheld was his face bending over her. Recalling nothing of what 
had occurred, it seemed to her, in the dreamy condition in which the fit had 
left her, the same face, unchanged, which had once shone in upon her tardy 
springtime, and promised to ripen it into summer. She forgot it had departed and 
left her in the wintry cold. And so she uttered wild words of love and trust; 
and the youth, while stung with remorse at his own neglect, was astonished to 
perceive the poetic forms of beauty in which the soul of the uneducated maiden 
burst into flower. But as her senses recovered themselves, the face gradually 
changed to her, as if the slow alteration of two years had been 
phantasmagorically compressed into a few moments; and the glow departed from the 
maiden's thoughts and words, and her soul found itself at the narrow window of 
the present, from which she could behold but a dreary country.-From the street 
came the iambic cry of the fool, "Come hame, come hame."
Tycho Brahe, I think, is said to have kept a fool, who frequently sat at his 
feet in his study, and to whose mutterings he used to listen in the pauses of 
his own thought. The shining soul of the astronomer drew forth the rainbow of 
harmony from the misty spray of words ascending ever from the dark gulf into 
which the thoughts of the idiot were ever falling. He beheld curious 
concurrences of words therein; and could read strange meanings from 
them-sometimes even received wondrous hints for the direction of celestial 
inquiry, from what, to any other, and it may be to the fool himself, was but a 
ceaseless and aimless babble. Such power lieth in words. It is not then to be 
wondered at, that the sounds I have mentioned should fall on the ears of Elsie, 
at such a moment, as a message from God Himself. This then-all this 
dreariness-was but a passing show like the rest, and there lay somewhere for her 
a reality-a home. The tears burst up from her oppressed heart. She received the 
message, and prepared to go home. From that time her strength gradually sank, 
but her spirits as steadily rose.
The strength of the fool, too, began to fail, for he was old. He bore all the 
signs of age, even to the grey hairs, which betokened no wisdom. But one cannot 
say what wisdom might be in him, or how far he had fought his own battle, and 
been victorious. Whether any notion of a continuance of life and thought dwelt 
in his brain, it is impossible to tell; but he seemed to have the idea that this 
was not his home; and those who saw him gradually approaching his end, might 
well anticipate for him a higher life in the world to come. He had passed 
through this world without ever awaking to such a consciousness of being as is 
common to mankind. He had spent his years like a weary dream through a long 
night-a strange, dismal, unkindly dream; and now the morning was at hand. Often 
in his dream had he listened with sleepy senses to the ringing of the bell, but 
that bell would awake him at last. He was like a seed buried too deep in the 
soil, to which the light has never penetrated, and which, therefore, has never 
forced its way upwards to the open air, ever experienced the resurrection of the 
dead. But seeds will grow ages after they have fallen into the earth; and, 
indeed, with many kinds, and within some limits, the older the seed before it 
germinates, the more plentiful the fruit. And may it not be believed of many 
human beings, that, the Great Husbandman having sown them like seeds in the soil 
of human affairs, there they lie buried a life long; and only after the 
upturning of the soil by death reach a position in which the awakening of their 
aspiration and the consequent growth become possible. Surely He has made nothing 
in vain.
A violent cold and cough brought him at last near to his end, and hearing that 
he was ill, Elsie ventured one bright spring day to go to see him. When she 
entered the miserable room where he lay, he held out his hand to her with 
something like a smile, and muttered feebly and painfully, "I'm gaein' to the 
wow, nae to come back again." Elsie could not restrain her tears; while the old 
man, looking fixedly at her, though with meaningless eyes, muttered, for the 
last time, "Come hame! come hame!" and sank into a lethargy, from which nothing 
could rouse him, till, next morning, he was waked by friendly death from the 
long sleep of this world's night. They bore him to his favourite churchyard, and 
buried him within the site of the old church, below his loved bell, which had 
ever been to him as the cuckoo-note of a coming spring. Thus he at length obeyed 
its summons, and went home.
Elsie lingered till the first summer days lay warm on the land. Several kind 
hearts in the village, hearing of her illness, visited her and ministered to 
her. Wondering at her sweetness and patience, they regretted they had not known 
her before. How much consolation might not their kindness have imparted, and how 
much might not their sympathy have strengthened her on her painful road! But 
they could not long have delayed her going home. Nor, mentally constituted as 
she was, would this have been at all to be desired. Indeed it was chiefly the 
expectation of departure that quieted and soothed her tremulous nature. It is 
true that a deep spring of hope and faith kept singing on in her heart, but this 
alone, without the anticipation of speedy release, could only have kept her mind 
at peace. It could not have reached, at least for a long time, the border land 
between body and mind, in which her disease lay.
One still night of summer, the nurse who watched by her bedside heard her murmur 
through her sleep, "I hear it: come hame-come hame. I'm comin', I'm comin'-I'm 
gaein' hame to the wow, nae to come back." She awoke at the sound of her own 
words, and begged the nurse to convey to her brother her last request, that she 
might be buried by the side of the fool, within the old church of Ruthven. Then 
she turned her face to the wall, and in the morning was found quiet and cold. 
She must have died within a few minutes after her last words. She was buried 
according to her request; and thus she too went home.
Side by side rest the aged fool and the young maiden; for the bell called them, 
and they obeyed; and surely they found the fire burning bright, and heard 
friendly voices, and felt sweet lips on theirs, in the home to which they went. 
Surely both intellect and love were waiting them there.
Still the old bell hangs in the old gable; and whenever another is borne to the 
old churchyard, it keeps calling to those who are left behind, with the same 
sad, but friendly and unchanging voice-"Come hame! come hame! come hame!"
 
"Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw itself: for the 
Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be 
ended."-ISA. LX 20.