at the bigness of the world. Folded nooks in
the hills swept past, enclosing their lonely farms; then the open
straths, where autumnal waters gave a pale gleam to the sky. Sodden
moors stretched away in vast patient loneliness. Then a gray smear of
rain blotted the world, penning him in with his dejection. He seemed to
be rushing through unseen space, with no companion but his own
foreboding. "Where are you going to?" asked his mind, and the wheels of
the train repeated the question all the way to Edinburgh, jerking it out
in two short lines and a long one: "Where are you going to? Where are
you going to? Ha, ha, Mr. Gourlay, where are you going to?"

It was the same sensitiveness to physical impression which won him to
Barbie that repelled him from the outer world. The scenes round Barbie,
so vividly impressed, were his friends, because he had known them from
his birth; he was a somebody in their midst and had mastered their
familiarity; they were the ministers of his mind. Those other scenes
were his foes, because, realizing them morbidly in relation to himself,
he was cowed by their big indifference to him, and felt puny, a nobody
before them. And he could not pass them like more manly and more callous
minds; they came burdening in on him whether he would or no. Neither
could he get above them. Except when lording it at Barbie, he had never
a quick reaction of the mind on what he saw; it possessed him, not he
it.

About twilight, when the rain had ceased, his train was brought up with
a jerk between the stations. While the rattle and bang continued it
seemed not unnatural to young Gourlay (though depressing) to be whirling
through the darkening land; it went past like a panorama in a dream. But
in the dead pause following the noise he thought it "queer" to be
sitting here in the intense quietude and looking at a strange and
unfamiliar scene--planted in its midst by a miracle of speed, and
gazing at it closely through a window! Two ploughmen from the farmhouse
near the line were unyoking at the end of the croft; he could hear the
muddy noise ("splorroch" is the Scotch of it) made by the big hoofs on
the squashy head-rig. "Bauldy" was the name of the shorter ploughman, so
yelled to by his mate; and two of the horses were "Prince and Rab"--just
like a pair in Loranogie's stable. In the curtainless window of the
farmhouse shone a leaping flame--not the steady glow of a lamp, but the
tossing brightness of a fire--and th