After her death he was heard by his neighbours reciting the poem to himself, generally with his door locked.

He is said to have declaimed part of it one still evening from the top of the commonty like one addressing a multitude, and the idlers who had crept up to jeer at him fell back when they saw his face.

He walked through them, they told, with his old body straight once more, and a queer light playing on his face.

His lips are moving as I see him turning the corner of the brae.

So he passed from youth to old age, and all his life seemed a dream, except that part of it in which he was writing, or printing, or stitching, or binding "The Millennium." At last the work was completed.
"It is finished," he printed at the end of the last book.