speaking if pushed to it.

"Ay, they say that?" repeated the Paymaster, pinching his snuff
vigorously. "Maybe they're right too. I'll tell you what. The lad's head
is stuffed with wind. He goes about with notions swishing round inside
that head of his, as much the plaything of nature as the reed that
whistles in the wind at the riverside and fancies itself a songster."

Mr. Spencer tilted his London hat down upon his brow, fumbled with his
fob-chain, and would have liked to ask the Paymaster if his well-known
intention to send Gilian on the same career he and his brothers had
followed was to be carried into effect But he felt instinctively that
this was a delicate question. He let it pass unput.

Bob MacGibbon had no such delicacy. The same day at their meridian in
the "Abercrombie" he broached the topic.

"I'll tell you what it is, Captain: if that young fellow of yours is
ever to earn salt for his kail, it is time he was taking a crook in his
hand."

"A crook in his hand?" said the Paymaster. "Would you have nothing else
for him but a crook?"

"Well," said MacGibbon, "I supposed you would be for putting him into
Ladyfield. If that is not your notion, I wonder why you keep it on for."

"Ladyfield!" cried the Paymaster. "There was no notion further from my
mind. Farming, for all Duke George's reductions, is the last of trades
nowadays. I think I told you plain enough that we meant to make him a
soger."

MacGibbon shrugged his shoulders. "If you did I forgot," said he. "It
never struck me. A soger? Oh, very well. It is in your family: your
influence will be useful." And he changed the subject.

At the very moment that thus they discussed him, Gilian, a truant from
school, which now claimed his attention, as Brooks sorrowfully said,
"when he had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go," was on an
excursion to the Waterfoot, where the Duglas in a sandy delta unravels
at the end into numerous lesser streams, like the tip of a knotless
fishing-line. It was a place for which he had an exceeding fondness.
For here in the hot days of summer there was a most rare seclusion. No
living thing shared the visible land with him except the sea-birds, the
white-bellied, the clean and wholesome and free, talking like children
among the weeds or in their swooping essays overhead. A place of islets
and creeks, where the mud lay golden below the river's peaty flow;
he had but to shut his eyes for a little and look upon it lazi