ch the same favour
as if they had been authentic. But the revival scarcely reached Sir
George. He said little or nothing, but, between his slow gulps of
toddy, sat looking vacantly into his glass. It is true he smiled
absently now and then when the others laughed, but that was only for
manners. Doubtless he was seeing somewhere the saddest of all
visions--the things that might have been. The wretched craving of
the lower organs stilled, and something spared for his brain, I
believe the chief joy his drink gave him lay in the power once more
to feel himself a gentleman. The washed hands, the shaven face, the
clean shirt, had something to do with it, no doubt, but the
necromantic whisky had far more.

What faded ghosts of ancestral dignity and worth and story the evil
potion called up in the mind of Sir George!--who himself hung ready
to fall, the last, or all but the last, mildewed fruit of the tree
of Galbraith! Ah! if this one and that of his ancestors had but
lived to his conscience, and with some thought of those that were to
come after him, he would not have transmitted to poor Sir George, in
horrible addition to moral weakness, that physical proclivity which
had now grown to such a hideous craving. To the miserable wretch
himself it seemed that he could no more keep from drinking whisky
than he could from breathing air.

CHAPTER V.

GIBBIE'S CALLING.

I am not sure that his father's neglect was not on the whole better
for Gibbie than would have been the kindness of such a father
persistently embodying itself. But the picture of Sir George, by
the help of whisky and the mild hatching oven of Mistress Croale's
parlour, softly breaking from the shell of the cobbler, and floating
a mild gentleman in the air of his lukewarm imagination, and poor
wee Gibbie trotting outside in the frosty dark of the autumn night,
through which the moon keeps staring down, vague and disconsolate,
is hardly therefore the less pathetic. Under the window of the
parlour where the light of revel shone radiant through a red
curtain, he would stand listening for a moment, then, darting off a
few yards suddenly and swiftly like a scared bird, fall at once into
his own steady trot--up the lane and down, till he reached the
window again, where again he would stand and listen. Whether he
made this departure and return twenty or a hundred times in a night,
he nor any one else could have told. Sometimes he would for a
change