Her laugh was very infectious; it
began with a low, mirthful ripple, well down in the throat, and rose in
rapid leaps of musical joy till it had traveled a whole octave of
bubbling happy sounds, when it culminated in a peal of double forte
shakes and trills, that made it a joy to hear, and finally it died out
in an "Oh, dear me! What a callan Mansie was!"
As Robert approached manhood, he took more and more to the moors,
wandering alone among the haunts of the whaup and other moor birds,
wrestling with problems to which older heads never gave a thought,
trying to understand life and to build from his heart and experience
something that would be satisfying. Silent, thoughtful, "strange" to the
neighbors, a problem to everyone, but a bigger one to himself, life
staggered him and appalled his soul.
Earnestly he worked and tested his thought against the thought of
others, sturdily refusing everything which did not ring true and meet
his standard. Old religious conceptions, the orthodoxy of his kith and
kin, were fast tested in the crucible of his mind and flung aside as
worthless. The idea of Hell and the old Morrisonian notion of the
Hereafter appeared crude and barbarous.
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