e
should never be pronounced by intelligent men but with respect.

He did not look like a hero. When the boys of the town saw him coming
out of his baker's shop, in a tall stove-pipe hat, an old-fashioned
dress coat and jean trousers, they used to follow him to the shore, and
watch him as he walked along it with his eyes fixed upon the ground.
Suddenly he would stop, fall upon his hands and knees, crawl slowly
onward, and then with one hand catch something on the sand; an insect,
perhaps. He would stick it upon a pin, put it in his hat, and go on his
way; and the boys would whisper to one another that there was a mad
baker in Thurso. Once he picked up a nut upon the beach, and said to his
companion:--

"That has been brought by the ocean current and the prevailing winds all
the way from one of the West India Islands."

He made the most astonishing journeys about that fag end of the universe
in the pursuit of knowledge. We read of his walking thirty-two miles in
a soaking rain to the top of a mountain, and bringing home only a plant
of white heather. On another day he walked thirty-six miles to find a
peculiar kind of fern. Again he walked for twenty-four hours in hail,
rain, and wind, reaching home at three o'clock in the morning. But at
seven he was up and ready for work as usual. He carried heavy loads,
too, when he went searching for minerals and fossils. In one of his
letters we read:--

"Shouldering an old poker, a four-pound hammer, and with two chisels in
my pocket, I set out.... What hammering! what sweating! Coat off; got my
hands cut to bleeding."

In another letter he speaks of having "three pounds of iron chisels in
his trousers pocket, a four-pound hammer in one hand and a
fourteen-pound sledge-hammer in the other, and his old beaver hat filled
with paper and twine."

But who and what was this man, and why was he performing these laborious
journeys? Robert Dick, born in 1811, was the son of an excise officer,
who gave his children a hard stepmother when Robert was ten years old.
The boy's own mother, all tenderness and affection, had spoiled him for
such a life as he now had to lead under a woman who loved him not, and
did not understand his unusual cast of character, his love of nature,
his wanderings by the sea, his coming home with his pockets full of wet
shells and his trousers damaged by the mire. She snubbed him; she
whipped him. He bore her ill treatment with wonderful patience; but it
impair