“I almost envy you,” returned Mr Graham, “when I think how you will praise God one day. What a glorious waking you will have!”
“Ten it’ll pe your opinion, Mr Craham, tat she’ll pe sleeping her sound sleep, and not pe lying wite awake in her coffin all ta time?”
“A good deal better than that, Mr MacPhail!” returned the schoolmaster cheerily. “It’s my opinion that you are, as it were, asleep now, and that the moment you die, you will feel as if you had just woke up, and for the first time in your life. For one thing, you will see far better then than any of us do now.”
But poor Duncan could not catch the idea; his mind was filled with a preventing fancy.
“Yes; I know; at ta tay of chutchment,” he said. “Put what’ll pe ta use of ketting her eyes open pefore she’ll pe up? How should she pe seeing with all ta earth apove her—and ta cravestone too tat I know my poy Malcolm will pe laying on ta top of his old cranfather to keep him waarm, and let peoples pe know tat ta plind piper will be lying town pelow wite awake and fery uncomfortable?”
“Excuse me, Mr MacPhail, but that’s all a mistake,” said Mr Graham positively. “The body is but a sort of shell that we cast off when we die, as the corn casts off its husk when it begins to grow. The life of the seed comes up out of the earth in a new body, as St Paul says,——”
“Ten,” interrupted Duncan, “she’ll pe crowing up out of her crave like a seed crowing up to pe a corn or a parley?”
The schoolmaster began to despair of ever conveying to the piper the idea that the living man is the seed sown, and that when the body of this seed dies, then the new body, with the man in it, springs alive out of the old one—that the death of the one is the birth of the other. Far more enlightened people than Duncan never imagine, and would find it hard to believe, that the sowing of the seed spoken of might mean something else than the burying of the body; not perceiving what yet surely is plain enough, that that would be the sowing of a seed already dead, and incapable of giving birth to anything whatever.
“No, no,” he said, almost impatiently, “you will never be in the grave: it is only your body that will go there, with nothing like life about it except the smile the glad soul has left on it. The poor body when thus forsaken is so dead that it can’t even stop smiling. Get Malcolm to read to you out of the book of the Revelation how there were multitudes even then standing before the throne. They had died in this world, yet there they were, well and happy.”
“Oh, yes!” said Duncan, with no small touch of spitefulness in his tone, “—twang-twanging at teir fine colden herps! She’ll not be thinking much of ta herp for a music-maker! And peoples tells her she’ll not pe hafing her pipes tere! Och hone! Och hone!—She’ll chust pe lying still and not pe ketting up, and when ta work is ofer, and eferypody cone away, she’ll chust pe ketting up, and taking a look apout her, to see if she’ll pe finding a stand o’ pipes that some coot highlandman has peen left pehint him when he tied lately.”