said they liked to read it, because I told them some of
the things they often thought about, but had never been able to express.

Nort found Fergus far harder to influence than he found me. A curious
change had been going on in Fergus which I did not at first understand.
At times he was more garrulous than ever I had known him to be, and at
times he was a very sphinx for silence. It is a curious thing how people
surprise us. In our vanity we begin to think we know them to the
uttermost, and then one day, possibly by accident, possibly in a moment
of emotion, a little secret door springs open in the smooth panel of
their visible lives, and we see within a long, long corridor with other
doors and passages opening away from it in every direction--the vast
secret chambers of their lives.

I had some such experience with that prickly Scotchman, Fergus
MacGregor. It began one evening when I found him alone by the office
fire. He was sitting smoking his impossible pipe and gazing into the
glowing open draft of the corpulent stove. He did not even look around
when I came in, but reaching out one foot kicked a chair over toward me.
Suddenly he fetched a big sigh, and said in a tone of voice I had not
before heard:

"Night is the mither o' thoughts."

He relapsed into silence again. After some moments he took his pipe out
and remarked to the stove:

"Oaks fall when reeds stand."

"Fergus," I said, "you're cryptic to-night. What do you consider
yourself, an oak or a reed?"

"Well, David, I'm the oak that falls, while the reed stands."

I tried to draw him out still further on this interesting point, but not
another explanatory word would he say. It was the beginning, however, of
a new understanding of Fergus.

A little later, that very evening, Anthy and her uncle came in for a
moment on their way home from some call or entertainment, and not a
minute behind them, Nort. I saw Fergus's eyes dwell a moment on Anthy
and then return to his moody observation of the fire. And Anthy was well
worth a second glance that evening. The sharp winter wind had touched
her cheeks with an unaccustomed radiance, and had blown her hair, where
the scarf did not quite protect it, wavily about her temples. She was in
great spirits.

"Fergus," she cried out, "what do you mean sitting here all humped up
over the fire on a wonderful night like this!"

Here Nort broke in:

"Fergus is thinking about what he will put into his issue of the
_S