e regions

Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things.

Alec's college-life had interposed a gulf between him and his previous
history. But his approaching departure into places unknown and a life
untried, operated upon his spiritual condition like the approach of
death; and he must strengthen again all the old bonds which had been
stretched thin by time and absence; he must make righteous atonement
for the wrong of neglect; in short, he must set his inward house in
order, ere he went forth to the abodes of ice. Death is not a breaker
but a renewer of ties. And if in view of death we gird up the loins of
our minds, and unite our hearts into a whole of love, and tenderness,
and atonement, and forgiveness, then Death himself cannot be that thing
of forlornness and loss.

He took a day to go and see Curly, and spent a pleasant afternoon with
him, recalling the old times, and the old stories, and the old
companions; for the youth with the downy chin has a past as ancient as
that of the man with the gray beard. And Curly told him the story of
his encounter with young Bruce on the bank of the Wan Water. And over
and over again Annie's name came up, but Curly never hinted at her
secret.

The next evening he went to see Thomas Crann. Thomas received him with
a cordiality amounting even to gruff tenderness.

"I'm richt glaid to see ye," he said; "and I tak' it verra kin' o' ye,
wi' a' yer gran' learnin', to come and see an ignorant man like me. But
Alec, my man, there's some things 'at I ken better nor ye ken them yet.
Him that made the whauls is better worth seekin' nor the whauls
themsel's. God's works may swallow the man that follows them, but God
himsel' 's the hidin'-place frae the wind, and the covert frae the
tempest. Set na up nae fause God--that's the thing 'at ye lo'e best, ye
ken--for like Dawgon, it'll fa', and maybe brain ye i' the fa'. Come
doon upo' yer knees wi' me, and I'll pray for ye. But ye maun pray for
yersel', or my prayers winna be o' muckle avail: ye ken that."

Yielding to the spiritual power of Thomas, whose gray-blue eyes were
flashing with fervour, Alec kneeled down as he was desired, and Thomas
said:

"O thou who madest the whales to play i' the great watters, and gavest
unto men sic a need o' licht that they maun hunt the leviathan to haud
their lamps burnin' at nicht whan thou hast sent thy sun awa' to ither
lands, be thou r