It still has its message, and now it sounded to welcome back the exiled mother and son under its precious care again.
The world has not within its power to devise, much less to bestow upon us, such reward as that which the Abbey bell gave when it tolled in our honor.

But my brother Tom should have been there also; this was the thought that came.

He, too, was beginning to know the wonders of that bell ere we were away to the newer land.
Rousseau wished to die to the strains of sweet music.

Could I choose my accompaniment, I could wish to pass into the dim beyond with the tolling of the Abbey bell sounding in my ears, telling me of the race that had been run, and calling me, as it had called the little white-haired child, for the last time--_to sleep_.
I have had many letters from readers speaking of this passage in my book, some of the writers going so far as to say that tears fell as they read.

It came from the heart and perhaps that is why it reached the hearts of others.
We were rowed over in a small boat to the Edinburgh steamer in the Firth of Forth.