I mean the lines:
How men that niver have kenned aboot it
Can lieve their after lives withoot it
I canna tell, for day and nicht
It comes unca'd for to my sicht."
"Yes," she replied, smiling sadly, and then, mocking my bad Scotch,
"and do ye ken that ither one, a native too of that country where, as
you say, poetry is a rare plant; that great wanderer over many lands
and seas, seeker after summer everlasting, who died thousands of miles
from home in a tropical island, and was borne to his grave on a
mountain top by the dark-skinned barbarous islanders, weeping and
lamenting their dead Tusitala, and the lines he wrote - do you remember?
Be it granted to me to behold you again in dying,
Hills of my home! and to hear again the call -
Hear about the graves of the martyrs, the pee-wees crying,
And hear no more at all!"
"Oh, I was foolish to quote those lines on a Scotch burn to you,
knowing how you would take such a thing up! For you are the very soul
of sadness - a sadness that is like a cruelty - and for all your love, my
sister, you would have killed me with your sadness had I not refused to
listen so many many times!"
"No! No!
