d every one. Indeed, he
said words at that hour which would have made much trouble and
ill-will if the minister had not justified them and called Liot's
anger a "righteous one."

And in those days there was absolutely no literature for the people.
Books were dear and scarce; ten years might pass without a new one
drifting into a hamlet; and newspapers were few and for the rich
alone. David, then, had but one book--the Holy Scriptures. He
read them, and read them again, and found everything in them.
Fortunately, the wonderful wisdom and stories of the Apocrypha had
not then been discarded; the book had its place between the Old
and the New Testament. And David was wise with Solomon, and saw
beautiful visions with Esdras, and lived and glowed and fought with
the heroic Maccabees.

And we who have far more books than we can read can hardly
understand how David loved the Bible. It was his poetry, his
philosophy, his history; it was, above all, the speech of God to man.
Through it he breathed the air of the old, old East, and grew up
under the shadows of Judea's palms and olives; so that the rainy
gloom of the coast of Skye was but an accident of his existence.
Abraham and Joseph, Moses and Joshua, were far more real personages
to David Borson than the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon and his
twelve marshals. Through the stormy days when it was impossible to go
to sea, and in the long winter nights, when he stretched himself
before the red peats with a little oil-cruse, he and the Bible
were friends and companions. It kept him in direct relation with
God and heaven; it fed him on faith; it made him subject to duty; it
gave him a character at once courageous and gentle, calm and
ideal--such a character as is very rare in our days, and which,
where it does exist, will _not_ be transmitted.

So that, with all his hard work and many deprivations, David had
his happy hours. And the years went by, and he grew up to a fair and
stately manhood, not rebelling against his fate, but taking it as
a part of the inscrutable mystery of life and death constantly
before his eyes. Others around him suffered in like manner, and at
the end one thing happened to all. No; it was not the tyranny of
nature nor of his material life that troubled David as he approached
manhood; it was the spiritual tyranny under which he lived and
prayed which darkened his days and filled his nights with thoughts
which he dared not follow to their proper conclusio