y. I had no doubt as to being nominated, but when the results were
posted I felt shame to be whole three places in front of Freddie
Esquillant, my master in all real scholarship, almost as much as my
father was--but who, on the day of trial, had spent his time in
answering thoroughly half-a-dozen questions without attempting the
others.

At any rate it was none such bad news to send by the carrier, who put up
at the Black Bull in the Grassmarket, down to my mother and grandmother
in Eden Valley. I wrote to them separately, but to my father first,
because he understood such things and I knew that his heart was set on
Freddie and myself, though he thought (and rightly) that I was a mere
clodhopper at my books compared to Fred. As far as the classics went, my
father was in the right of it. But then Freddie could not write English,
except in a kind of long-winded, elaborate way, as if he were
translating from Cicero, which very likely was the case.

Well, the need of keeping my head for the examiners' questions, the
mending of my pens, the big barren room with the books about and the
other fellows scribbling away for dear life, the landladies in this
close and that square, with faces hardened and tempers sharpened by
generations of needy students, out of whom they must nevertheless make
their scanty livings, the penetrating Edinburgh airs, the thinness of my
cloak and the clumsiness of my countrified rig--these all kept me
singularly aware of myself, and prevented any yielding to the folly of
homesickness, or, as in my case, "Irma-sickness," to give the trouble
its proper name.

After long search I took up my lodging in a new house at the end of
Rankeillor Street, in a place where there was the greenness of fields
every way about, except behind in the direction of the college. It was
the very last house, and from my garret window I could see the top of
Arthur's Seat and the little breakneck path feeling its way round the
foot of the Salisbury Crags, afterwards to be widened into the
"Radicals' Road." Southward all was green and whaup-haunted to the grey
hip of Pentland, and we saw the spread of the countryside when we--that
is, Freddie and I--went down the Dalkeith Road to the red-roofed hamlet
of Echobank. Here, four times a week we bought a canful of milk that had
to do us two days. For there was something about the taste of the town
milk that scunnered us--Freddie especially being more delicately
stomached than I.