self? We are all members one of another. Murray speaks of his
experience of human beings, as rich in examples of kindness and
good-will. His shyness, his reserve, his extreme unselfishness,--carried
to the point of diffidence,--made him rather shun than seek older people
who were dangerously likely to be serviceable. His manner, when once he
could be induced to meet strangers, was extremely frank and pleasant, but
from meeting strangers he shrunk, in his inveterate modesty.

In 1886 Murray had the misfortune to lose is father, and it became,
perhaps, more prominently needful that he should find a profession. He
now assisted Professor Meiklejohn of St. Andrews in various kinds of
literary and academic work, and in him found a friend, with whom he
remained in close intercourse to the last. He began the weary path,
which all literary beginners must tread, of sending contributions to
magazines. He seldom read magazine articles. 'I do not greatly care for
"Problems" and "vexed questions." I am so much of a problem and a vexed
question that I have quite enough to do in searching for a solution of my
own personality.' He tried a story, based on 'a midnight experience' of
his own; unluckily he does not tell us what that experience was. Had he
encountered one of the local ghosts?

'My blood-curdling romance I offered to the editor of _Longman's
Magazine_, but that misguided person was so ill-advised as to return it,
accompanied with one of these abominable lithographed forms conveying his
hypocritical regrets.' Murray sent a directed envelope with a twopenny-
halfpenny stamp. The paper came back for three-halfpence by book-post.
'I have serious thoughts of sueing him for the odd penny!' 'Why should
people be fools enough to read my rot when they have twenty volumes of
Scott at their command?' He confesses to 'a Scott-mania almost as
intense as if he were the last new sensation.' 'I was always fond of
him, but I am fonder than ever now.' This plunge into the immortal
romances seems really to have discouraged Murray; at all events he says
very little more about attempts in fiction of his own. 'I am a barren
rascal,' he writes, quoting Johnson on Fielding. Like other men, Murray
felt extreme difficulty in writing articles or tales which have an
infinitesimal chance of being accepted. It needs a stout heart to face
this almost fixed certainty of rejection: a man is weakened by his
apprehensions of a lithographed