"I can still preach and visit my people, and perhaps God will let me die in harness, with the sound of Tweed in my ears." Mrs.Macdonald was, in Bible words, a "succourer of many." She was a little stout woman with the merry heart that goes all the way, combined with heavy-lidded, sad eyes, and a habit of sighing deeply.

She affected to take a sad view of everything, breaking into irrepressible laughter in the middle of the most pessimistic utterances, for she was able to see the humorous side of her own gloom.

Mrs.Macdonald was a born giver; everything she possessed she had to share.

She was miserable if she had nothing to bestow on a parting guest, small gifts like a few new-laid eggs or a pot of home-made jam.
"You know yourself," she would say, "what a satisfied feeling it gives you to come away from a place with even the tiniest gift." Her popularity was immense.

Sad people came to her because she sighed with them and never tried to cheer them; dull people came to her because she was never in offensive high spirits or in a boastful mood--not even when her sons had done something particularly striking--and happy people came to her, for, though she sighed and warned them that nothing lasted in this world, her eyes shone with pleasure, and her interest was so keen that every detail could be told and discussed and gloated over with the comfortable knowledge that Mrs.
Macdonald would not say to her next visitor that she had been simply _deaved_ with talk about So-and-so's engagement.
Mrs.Macdonald believed in speaking her mind--if she had anything pleasant to say, and she was sometimes rather startling in her frankness to strangers.