me. He was looking less gaunt now, and the rugged lines of his face were
tinged with a more healthy colour. He was a handsome youth, I noticed,
with shrewd grey eyes and a chin that stood out like the ram of a
battle-ship.

He told me all about himself, some of which has been set down here
already. He had done well at Edinburgh University, and, having obtained
his Arts degree, was on the point of settling down to study for the
ministry--the be-all and end-all of the hope of a humble Scottish
household--when disaster came tumbling upon his family. His brother
David fell sick in his lungs, and the doctor prescribed a sojourn in a
drier climate for at least a year.

The next part of the narrative was rather elliptical; but from the fact
that money was immediately forthcoming to send David abroad, and that
Robin had simultaneously given up his work in Edinburgh and returned
home to help his father about the farm, I gathered that a life's
ambition had been voluntarily sacrificed on the altar of family duty.
Anyhow, when David returned, marvellously and mercifully restored to
health, setting his younger brother free once more, two precious years
had flown; so that Robin now found himself, at the age of twenty-three,
faced with the alternative of making a fresh start in life or remaining
on the farm at home, that most pathetic and forlorn of failures, a
"stickit minister." The family exchequer had been depleted by David's
illness, and Robin, rather than draw any further on the vanishing little
store of pound-notes in the cupboard behind the kitchen chimney,
determined to go to London and turn his education to some account.

He had arrived three years ago, with a barrel of salt herrings and a bag
of meal; and from that time he had earned his own living--if it could be
called a living.

"Once or twice," he said, "I have had an article taken by one of the big
reviews; sometimes I get some odd reporting to do; and whiles I just
have to write chatty paragraphs about celebrities for the snippety
papers."

"Uphill work that, I should think."

"Uphill? Downhill! Man, it's degrading. Do you know what I was doing in
that Museum this morning?"

"What?"

"Have you heard tell of a man they call Dean Ramsay?"

"Let me see--yes. He was a sort of Scottish Sidney Smith, wasn't he?"

"That is the man. Well, he collected most of the good stories in
Scotland and put them in a book. I was copying a few of them out; and I
shall father