frisking actively about the platform, pointer in hand, that which I seem
to see most clearly is the way his glasses glittered with affection. I
never knew but one other man who had (if you will permit the phrase) so
kind a spectacle, and that was Dr. Appleton.[5] But the light in his
case was tempered and passive; in Kelland's it danced, and changed, and
flashed vivaciously among the students, like a perpetual challenge to
goodwill.

I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, for a good reason.
Kelland's class I attended, once even gained there a certificate of
merit, the only distinction of my University career. But although I am
the holder of a certificate of attendance in the professor's own hand, I
cannot remember to have been present in the Greek class above a dozen
times. Professor Blackie was even kind enough to remark (more than once)
while in the very act of writing the document above referred to, that he
did not know my face. Indeed, I denied myself many opportunities; acting
upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost me
a great deal of trouble to put in exercise--perhaps as much as would
have taught me Greek--and sent me forth into the world and the
profession of letters with the merest shadow of an education. But they
say it is always a good thing to have taken pains, and that success is
its own reward, whatever be its nature; so that, perhaps, even upon this
I should plume myself, that no one ever played the truant with more
deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates for less education.
One consequence, however, of my system is that I have much less to say
of Professor Blackie than I had of Professor Kelland; and as he is still
alive, and will long, I hope, continue to be so, it will not surprise
you very much that I have no intention of saying it.

Meanwhile, how many others have gone--Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know not
who besides; and of that tide of students that used to throng the arch
and blacken the quadrangle, how many are scattered into the remotest
parts of the earth, and how many more have lain down beside their
fathers in their "resting-graves"! And again, how many of these last
have not found their way there, all too early, through the stress of
education! That was one thing, at least, from which my truantry
protected me. I am sorry indeed that I have no Greek, but I should be
sorrier still if I were dead; nor do I know the name of that branch of
knowledge w