contribution. But always there came a black day
when a desire to read the novel seized her, and she hurried home with it
beneath her rokelay. This year the dashing banker's choice was a lady's
novel called "I Love My Love with an A," and it was a frivolous tale,
those being before the days of the new fiction, with its grand discovery
that women have an equal right with men to grow beards. The hero had
such a way with him and was so young (Miss Ailie could not stand them a
day more than twenty) that the school-mistress was enraptured and scared
at every page, but she fondly hoped that Tommy did not understand.
However, he discovered one day what something printed thus, "D--n,"
meant, and he immediately said the word with such unction that Miss
Ailie let fall her knitting. She would have ended the readings then had
not Agatha been at that point in the arms of an officer who, Miss Ailie
felt almost certain, had a wife in India, and so how could she rest till
she knew for certain? To track the officer by herself was not to be
thought of, to read without knitting being such shameless waste of time,
and it was decided to resume the readings on a revised plan: Tommy to
say "stroke" in place of the "D--ns," and "word we have no concern with"
instead of "Darling" and "Little One."

Miss Ailie was not the only person at the Dovecot who admired Tommy.
Though in duty bound, as young patriots, to jeer at him for having been
born in the wrong place, the pupils of his own age could not resist the
charm of his reminiscences; even Gav Dishart, a son of the manse,
listened attentively to him. His great topic was his birthplace, and
whatever happened in Thrums, he instantly made contemptible by citing
something of the same kind, but on a larger scale, that had happened in
London; he turned up his nose almost farther than was safe when they
said Catlaw was a stiff mountain to climb. ("Oh, Gav, if you just saw
the London mountains!") Snow! why they didn't know what snow was in
Thrums. If they could only see St. Paul's or Hyde Park or Shovel! he
couldn't help laughing at Thrums, he couldn't--Larfing, he said at
first, but in a short time his Scotch was better than theirs, though
less unconscious. His English was better also, of course, and you had to
speak in a kind of English when inside the Hanky School; you got your
revenge at "minutes." On the whole, Tommy irritated his fellow-pupils a
good deal, but they found it difficult to keep away