instantly blighted. Privately she used to go in
by herself and pore over the unknown wonders of Ebenezer's Greek prose
versions, with an admiration which the class-assistant in Edinburgh had
never been able to feel for them.

Such was the career of Ebenezer Skinner for four years. He oscillated
between the dinginess and dulness of the capital as he knew it, and the
well-accustomed rurality of his home. For him the historic associations
of Edinburgh were as good as naught. He and Sandy Kerr (Bench Seventeen)
heard the bugles blaring at ten o'clock from the Castle on windy
Saturday nights, as they walked up the Bridges, and never stirred a
pulse! They never went into Holyrood, because some one told Ebenezer
that there was a shilling to pay. He did not know what a quiet place it
was to walk and read in on wet Saturdays, when there is nothing whatever
to pay. He read no books, confining himself to his class-books and the
local paper, which his mother laboriously addressed and sent to him
weekly. Occasionally he began to read a volume which one of his more
literary companions had acquired on the recommendation of one of the
professors, but he rarely got beyond the first twenty pages.

Yet there never was a more conscientious fellow than Ebenezer Skinner,
Student in Divinity. He studied all that he was told to study. He read
every book that by the regulations he was compelled to read. But he read
nothing besides. He found that he could not hold his own in the
give-and-take of his fellow-students' conversation. Therefore more and
more he withdrew himself from them, crystallising into his narrow early
conventions. His college learning acted like an unventilated mackintosh,
keeping all the unwholesome, morbid personality within, and shutting out
the free ozone and healthy buffeting of the outer world. Many
college-bred men enter life with their minds carefully mackintoshed.
Generally they go into the Church.

But he found his way through his course somehow. It was of him that
Kelland, kindliest and most liberal of professors, said when the
co-examiner hinted darkly of "spinning": "Poor fellow! We'll let him
through. He's done his best." Then, after a pause, and in the most
dulcet accents of a valetudinarian cherub, "It's true, his best is not
very good!"

But Ebenezer escaped from the logic class-room as a roof escapes from a
summer shower, and gladly found himself on the more proper soil of the
philosophy of morals. Here h