akes mair o't. He avowed his plain intention. 'I
mean to kick up a bit of a dust,' thays he. Oh, but he's the splurge!"

"Ay, ay," said Sandy Toddle, "thae students are a gey squad--especially
the young ministers."

"Ou," said Tam Wylie, "dinna be hard on the ministers. Ministers are
just like the rest o' folk. They mind me o' last year's early tatties.
They're grand when they're gude, but the feck o' them's frostit."

"Ay," said the Deacon, "and young Gourlay's frostit in the shaw already.
I doubt it'll be a poor ingathering."

"Weel, weel," said Tam Wylie, "the mair's the pity o' that, Deacon."

"Oh, it'th a grai-ait pity," said the Deacon, and he bowed his body
solemnly with outspread hands. "No doubt it'th a grai-ait pity!" and he
wagged his head from side to side, the picture of a poignant woe.

"I saw him in the Black Bull yestreen," said Brodie, who had been silent
hitherto in utter scorn of the lad they were speaking of--too disgusted
to open his mouth. "He was standing drinks to a crowd that were puffing
him up about that prize o' his."

"It's alwayth the numskull hath the most conceit," said the Deacon.

"And yet there must be something in him too, to get that prize," mused
the ex-Provost.

"A little ability's a dangerous thing," said Johnny Coe, who could think
at times. "To be safe you should be a genius winged and flying, or a
crawling thing that never leaves the earth. It's the half-and-half that
hell gapes for. And owre they flap."

But nobody understood him. "Drink and vanity'll soon make end of _him_,"
said Brodie curtly, and snubbed the philosopher.

Before the summer holiday was over (it lasts six months in Scotland)
young Gourlay was a habit-and-repute tippler. His shrinking abhorrence
from the scholastic life of Edinburgh flung him with all the greater
abandon into the conviviality he had learned to know at home. His mother
(who always seemed to sit up now, after Janet and Gourlay were in bed)
often let him in during the small hours, and as he hurried past her in
the lobby he would hold his breath lest she should smell it. "You're
unco late, dear," she would say wearily, but no other reproach did she
utter. "I was taking a walk," he would answer thickly; "there's a fine
moon!" It was true that when his terrible depression seized him he was
sometimes tempted to seek the rapture and peace of a moonlight walk
upon the Fleckie Road. In his crude clay there was a vein of poetry: he
could be a