Oh,
nothing to speak of, ye know--just a dram and a joke to pass the time
now and then!"

"Aha!" laughed Gourlay, "there's worse than a drink, by Jove. It puts
smeddum in your blood!"

Logan nipped the guard of his arm in heavy playfulness and led him to
the Howff.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Young Gourlay had found a means of escaping from his foolish mind. By
the beginning of his second session he was as able a toper as a publican
could wish. The somewhat sordid joviality of Allan's ring, their
wit-combats that were somewhat crude, appeared to him the very acme of
social intercourse. To emulate Logan and Allan was his aim. But drink
appealed to him in many ways besides. Now when his too apprehensive
nerves were frightened by bugbears in his lonely room he could be off to
the Howff and escape them. And drink inspired him with false courage to
sustain his pose as a hardy rollicker. He had acquired a kind of
prestige since the night of Allan's party, and two of the fellows whom
he met there--Armstrong and Gillespie--became his friends at College and
the Howff. He swaggered before them as he had swaggered at school both
in Barbie and Skeighan, and now there was no Swipey Broon to cut him
over the coxcomb. Armstrong and Gillespie--though they saw through
him--let him run on, for he was not bad fun when he was splurging. He
found, too, when with his cronies that drink unlocked his mind, and gave
a free flow to his ideas. Nervous men are often impotent of speech from
very excess of perception; they realize not merely what they mean to
say, but with the nervous antennae of their minds they feel the attitude
of every auditor. Distracted by lateral perceptions from the point
ahead, they blunder where blunter minds would go forward undismayed.
That was the experience of young Gourlay. If he tried to talk freely
when sober, he always grew confused. But drink deadened the outer rim of
his perception and left it the clearer in the middle for its
concentration. In plainer language, when he was drunk he was less afraid
of being laughed at, and free of that fear he was a better speaker. He
was driven to drink, then, by every weakness of his character. As
nervous hypochondriac, as would-be swaggerer, as a dullard requiring
stimulus, he found that drink, to use his own language, gave him
"smeddum."

With his second year he began the study of philosophy, and that added to
his woes. He had nerves to feel the Big Conundrum, but not the