dy of the two.

He used, however, to complain much at this time of feeling himself
incapable of any very strong emotion, even that of sorrow.

No doubt there is more stimulation to the brain than to the heart in
the highly critical atmosphere of all phases of the intellectual life
at Oxford; also Donald had hardly yet got over the shocks of his youth
and the loneliness of his life abroad. He was, too, essentially and
curiously the son of his father--even to his minor tastes, such as his
connoisseur's palate for a good wine and his judgment in "smokes"--and
this feeling of a certain detachment from the larger emotions of life
was always his father's pose--the philosopher's. In his father's case
it was perhaps engendered, if not necessitated, by his poor health and
wretched nerves.

But can we not trace his dissatisfaction at this time in what he felt
to be his cold philosophical attitude towards life to the same cause
as much of the misery he suffered as a boy! In the paper he calls
"School," which follows with that entitled "Home," he tells us how he
would have liked to have chastised a school-fellow "had he dared,"
and his failure to dare was evidently what reduced him to the state of
impotent rage described on page 9 of this sketch. Again at Woolwich,
what made him unhappy was not so much the evils which he saw but
his impotence to deal with them. So now again at Oxford he feels
"impotent," impotent this time to feel and sympathize as he would
have wished with suffering humanity. But within him was the light,
"the light which is, of course, not physical," which betrayed itself
through his wonderful smile--the same now as in babyhood; and from
his mother, and perhaps also from the young country that gave her
birth, he had inherited, as well as her great heart and broad human
sympathies, the vigour that was to carry him through the experiences
by means of which, in the fullness of time, that light, no longer
dormant, was to break into a flame of infinite possibilities.

Donald's one complaint against Oxford was that the ideas that are born
and generated there so often evaporate in talk and smoke. He left with
the determination to "do," but before going on to a Clergy School he
decided to accept a friend's invitation to visit him in savage Africa
so that he might think things over, and put to the test, far away from
the artificialities of Modern Life, the ideas he had assimilated in
the highly sophisticated atmospher