out the old sensation of pleasure with which the
boy felt himself made into the man's companion. He was awakened out of
his maze of dark and painful feelings by the voice of Derwentwater
calling upon him to admire the effect of the moonlight upon the river as
they crossed the bridge. For long after that scene remained in Jock's
mind against a background of mysterious shadows and perplexity. The moon
rode in the midst of a wide clearing of blue between two broken banks of
clouds. She was almost full, and approaching her setting. She shone full
upon the river, sweeping from side to side in one flood of silver,
broken only by a few strange little blacknesses, the few boats, like
houseless stragglers out by night and without shelter, which lay here
and there by a wharf or at the water's edge. The scene was wonderfully
still and solemn, not a motion to be seen either on street or stream.
"How is it, do you think," said Mr. Derwentwater, "that we think so
little of the sun when it is he that lights up a scene like this, and so
much of the moon?"

Jock was taken by surprise by this question, which was of a kind which
his tutor was fond of putting, and which brought back their old
relations instantaneously. Jock seemed to himself to wake up out of a
strange inarticulate dream of displeasure and embarrassment, and to feel
himself with sudden remorse, a traitor to his friend. He said,
faltering: "I don't know; it is always you that finds out the analogies.
I don't think that my mind is poetical at all."

"You do yourself injustice, Jock," said Derwentwater, his arm within
that of his pupil in their old familiar way. And then he said: "The moon
is the feminine influence which charms us by showing herself clearly as
the source of the light she sheds. The sun we rarely think of at all,
but only of what he gives us--the light and the heat that are our life.
Her," he pointed to the sky, "we could dispense with, save for the
beauty of her."

"I wish," said Jock, "I could think of anything so fine. But do you
think we could do without women like that?" said the inquiring young
spirit, ready to follow with his bosom bare whithersoever this refined
philosophy might lead.

"You and I will," said the instructor. "There are grosser and there are
tamer spirits to whom it might be different. I would not wrong you by
supposing that you, my boy, could ever be tempted in the gross way; and
I don't think you are of the butterfly dancing kind."