w years before.

At last, one day when his courage was almost gone, the words which his
father had spoken on his death-bed, and which he had forgotten up till
now, flashed into his mind.

"He said that I would find a faithful friend in the little lodge up in
the glen, when all my other friends had forsaken me," he said to
himself. "I cannot think what he meant, but surely now is the time to
test his words, for surely no man could be more forsaken than I am."

So he turned his face from the city, and wended his way over hill and
dale, moor and river, till he came to the little lodge, standing in the
lonely glen, high up on the moors near the Castle of Linne.

He had hardly seen the tumble-down old place since he was a boy, and
somehow, from his father's words, he expected to find someone living in
it--his good old nurse, perhaps. He was so worn out and miserable that
the tears came into his eyes at the mere thought of seeing her kindly
face. But the old building was quite deserted, and, when he forced open
the rusty lock, and entered, he found nothing but a low, dark,
comfortless room. The walls were bare and damp, and the little window
was so overgrown with ivy that scarcely any light could get in. There
was not even a chair or a table in it, nothing but a long rope with a
noose at the end of it, which hung dangling down from the ceiling.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he noticed that on the
rafter above the rope there was written in large letters--

"_Ah, graceless wretch, I knew that thou wouldst soon spoil all, and
bring thyself to poverty. So, to hide thy shame, and bring thy sorrows
to an end, I left this rope, which will prove thy best friend._"

"So my father knew the straits which my foolishness would bring me to,
and he thought of this way of ending my life," said the poor young man
to himself, and he felt so heart-broken, and so hopeless, that he put
his head in the noose and tried to hang himself.

But this was not the end of which his father had been thinking when he
wrote the words; he had only meant to give his son a lesson, which he
hoped would be a warning to him. So, when he put his head in the noose,
and took hold of the rope, the beam that it was fastened to gave way,
and the whole ceiling came tumbling down on top of him.

For a long time he lay stunned on the floor, and when at last he came to
himself, he could hardly remember what had happened. At last his eye
fell on a pack