iture.
Huh! What right has _he_ to set up his pipe?

His shirt stuck to his back. He would have liked the ground to open and
swallow him.

He gulped a huge swill of whisky to cover his vexation; and oh, the
mighty difference! A sudden courage flooded his veins. He turned with a
scowl on Wilson, and, "What the devil are _you_ sniggering at?" he
growled. Logan, the only senior who marked the byplay, thought him a
hardy young spunkie.

The moment the whisky had warmed the cockles of his heart Gourlay ceased
to care a rap for the sniggerers. Drink deadened his nervous perception
of the critics on his right and left, and set him free to follow his
idea undisturbed. It was an idea he had long cherished--being one of the
few that ever occurred to him. He rarely made phrases himself--though,
curiously enough, his father often did without knowing it--the harsh
grind of his character producing a flash. But Gourlay was aware of his
uncanny gift of visualization--or of "seeing things in the inside of his
head," as he called it--and vanity prompted the inference, that this was
the faculty that sprang the metaphor. His theory was now clear and
eloquent before him. He was realizing for the first time in his life
(with a sudden joy in the discovery) the effect of whisky to unloose the
brain; sentences went hurling through his brain with a fluency that
thrilled. If he had the ear of the company, now he had the drink to
hearten him, he would show Wilson and the rest that he wasn't such a
blasted fool! In a room by himself he would have spouted to the empty
air.

Some such point he had reached in the hurrying jumble of his thoughts
when Allan addressed him.

Allan did not mean his guest to be snubbed. He was a gentleman at heart,
not a cad like Tozer; and this boy was the son of a girl whose laugh he
remembered in the gloamings at Tenshillingland.

"I beg your pardon, John," he said in heavy benevolence--he had reached
that stage--"I beg your pardon. I'm afraid you was interrupted."

Gourlay felt his heart a lump in his throat, but he rushed into speech.

"Metaphor comes from the power of seeing things in the inside of your
head," said the unconscious disciple of Aristotle--"seeing them so vivid
that you see the likeness between them. When Bauldy Johnston said 'the
thumb-mark of his Maker was wet in the clay of him,' he _saw_ the print
of a thumb in wet clay, and he _saw_ the Almighty making a man out of
mud, the way He used to