rejoiced that he should even thus be set at
liberty from his horrible situation.[16] He longed to feel the tide of
human life ebbing and flowing around him, and to feel that he himself
was not a mere drone in the hive. During the progress of the trial,
though he was oblivious of most that was going on in the court-room,
memory and fancy were keenly alert, and he rapidly lived over again many
episodes of his past life. The dead and gone years rose up before him
like the scenes of a rapidly-shifting panorama, even as the past is said
to arise before the mental vision of those lying on beds of pain, just
before the great mystery of the grave is unfolded to their view.
Subjects and scenes long forgotten or seldom remembered presented
themselves. There was the little Fifeshire school, with its umbrageous
playground, where he had been a merry laughing lad, and where Dominie
Angus had given him his first taste of ferule and Fotherup. There was
the patched portrait of Cardinal Beaton, in St. Mary's College, at which
he and his friend John Dean had been wont to gaze with rapt admiration
in the old days left so far behind. There was that odd adventure among
the Mendip Hills, during his professional peregrination through
Somersetshire more than a dozen years before, and upon which he could
not remember that he had bestowed a single thought since his arrival in
Canada. There, too, was the drunken type-setter from Bristol, who had
taught him the technical marks to be used in making corrections for the
press, and whom he had neither seen nor thought of since the publication
of his pamphlet in which be had portrayed the sufferings of Bet Bennam
and Mary Bacon. Who shall say what other scenes, sad or mirthful,
presented themselves among his "thick-coming fancies"? Possibly he
recalled the high hopes of his boyhood, when he thirsted to better the
condition of the poor, and was almost persuaded that he had been sent
into the world expressly to guard their interests against the exactions
of grasping landlords. Visions, too, may have arisen before him of his
beautiful Wiltshire farm, where the modest daisies peeped above the
grass, and the joyous lark sang from the meadow; where he had once been
so happy in the companionship of his fond wife and little ones, who at
this moment waited in longing expectation for tidings from the absent
husband and father. Perchance also he called to mind, at that crisis,
his little dead daughter, who had blos