which his course in life must depend.

Nothing could have been better for Robert than the prospect of a college
education. But his first thought at the news was not of the delights
of learning nor of the honourable course that would ensue, but of
Eric Ericson, the poverty-stricken, friendless descendant of yarls and
sea-rovers. He would see him--the only man that understood him! Not
until the passion of this thought had abated, did he begin to perceive
the other advantages before him. But so practical and thorough was he
in all his proposals and means, that ere half-an-hour was gone, he
had begun to go over his Rudiments again. He now wrote a version, or
translation from English into Latin, five times a week, and read Caeser,
Virgil, or Tacitus, every day. He gained permission from his grandmother
to remove his bed to his own garret, and there, from the bedstead at
which he no longer kneeled, he would often rise at four in the morning,
even when the snow lay a foot thick on the skylight, kindle his lamp
by means of a tinder-box and a splinter of wood dipped in sulphur,
and sitting down in the keen cold, turn half a page of Addison into
something as near Ciceronian Latin as he could effect. This would take
him from an hour and a half to two hours, when he would tumble again
into bed, blue and stiff, and sleep till it was time to get up and go to
the morning school before breakfast. His health was excellent, else it
could never have stood such treatment.

CHAPTER III. 'THE END CROWNS ALL'.

His sole relaxation almost lay in the visit he paid every evening to
the soutar and his wife. Their home was a wretched place; but
notwithstanding the poverty in which they were now sunk, Robert soon
began to see a change, like the dawning of light, an alba, as the
Italians call the dawn, in the appearance of something white here and
there about the room. Robert's visits had set the poor woman trying to
make the place look decent. It soon became at least clean, and there
is a very real sense in which cleanliness is next to godliness. If the
people who want to do good among the poor would give up patronizing
them, would cease from trying to convert them before they have gained
the smallest personal influence with them, would visit them as those who
have just as good a right to be here as they have, it would be all the
better for both, perhaps chiefly for themselves.

For the first week or so, Alexander, unable either to work o