"Stonies, all right," said Cameron exultantly to himself. "And at
evening prayers, too, by Jove."
He remembered hearing McIvor tell how the Stonies never went on a
hunting expedition without their hymn books and never closed a day
without their evening worship. The voices were high-pitched and thin,
but from that distance they floated up soft and sweet. He could clearly
distinguish the music of the old Methodist hymn, the words of which were
quite familiar to him:
"There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel's veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood.
Lose all their guilty stains."
Over and over again, with strange wild cadences of their own invention,
the worshippers wailed forth the refrain,
"Lose all their guilty stains."
Then, all kneeling, they went to prayer. Over all, the misty moon
struggling through the broken clouds cast a pale and ghostly light. It
was, to Cameron with his old-world religious conventions and traditions,
a weirdly fascinating but intensely impressive scene. Afar beyond the
valley, appeared in dim outline the great mountains, with their heads
thrust up into the sky. Nearer at their bases gathered the pines, at
first in solid gloomy masses, then, as they approached, in straggling
groups, and at last singly, like tall sentinels on guard.
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