re he might surely find
concealment till the night should fall. Thither he passed down the lane;
and when he came there, behold! he had forgotten the frost, and the pond
was alive with young people skating, and the pond-side coverts were
thick with lookers-on. He looked on awhile himself. There was one tall,
graceful maiden, skating hand in hand with a youth, on whom she bestowed
her bright eyes perhaps too patently; and it was strange with what anger
John beheld her. He could have broken forth in curses; he could have
stood there, like a mortified tramp, and shaken his fist and vented his
gall upon her by the hour--or so he thought; and the next moment his
heart bled for the girl. "Poor creature, it's little she knows!" he
sighed. "Let her enjoy herself while she can!" But was it possible, when
Flora used to smile at him on the Braid ponds, she could have looked so
fulsome to a sick-hearted bystander?

The thought of one quarry, in his frozen wits, suggested another; and he
plodded off towards Craigleith. A wind had sprung up out of the
north-west; it was cruel keen, it dried him like a fire, and racked his
finger-joints. It brought clouds, too; pale, swift, hurrying clouds,
that blotted heaven and shed gloom upon the earth. He scrambled up among
the hazelled rubbish-heaps that surround the cauldron of the quarry, and
lay flat upon the stones. The wind searched close along the earth, the
stones were cutting and icy, the bare hazels wailed about him; and soon
the air of the afternoon began to be vocal with those strange and dismal
harpings that herald snow. Pain and misery turned in John's limbs to a
harrowing impatience and blind desire of change; now he would roll in
his harsh lair, and when the flints abraded him was almost pleased; now
he would crawl to the edge of the huge pit and look dizzily down. He saw
the spiral of the descending roadway, the steep crags, the clinging
bushes, the peppering of snow-wreaths, and, far down in the bottom, the
diminished crane. Here, no doubt, was a way to end it. But it somehow
did not take his fancy.

And suddenly he was aware that he was hungry; ay, even through the
tortures of the cold, even through the frosts of despair, a gross,
desperate longing after food, no matter what, no matter how, began to
wake and spur him. Suppose he pawned his watch? But no, on Christmas
Day--this was Christmas Day!--the pawn-shop would be closed. Suppose he
went to the public-house close by at Bl