st hour. He felt the benignness of the darkened heavens. A
tag of some forgotten poem he had read came back to his mind, and,
"Come, kindly night, and cover me," he muttered, with shaking lips; and
felt how true it was. My God, what a relief to be free of his father's
eyes! They had held him till his mother's voice broke the spell. They
seemed to burn him now.

What a fool he had been to face his father when empty both of food and
drink! Every man was down-hearted when he was empty. If his mother had
had time to get the tea, it would have been different; but the fire had
been out when he went in. "He wouldn't have downed me so easy if I had
had anything in me," he muttered, and his anger grew as he thought of
all he had been made to suffer. For he was still the swaggerer. Now that
the incubus of his father's tyranny no longer pressed on him directly, a
great hate rose within him for the tyrant. He would go back and have it
out when he was primed. "It's the only hame I have," he sobbed angrily
to the darkness; "I have no other place to gang till! Yes, I'll go back
and have it out with him when once I get something in me, so I will." It
was no disgrace to suck courage from the bottle for that encounter with
his father, for nobody could stand up to black Gourlay--nobody. Young
Gourlay was yielding to a peculiar fatalism of minds diseased: all that
affects them seems different from all that affects everybody else; they
are even proud of their separate and peculiar doom. Young Gourlay not
thought but felt it--he was different from everybody else. The heavens
had cursed nobody else with such a terrible sire. It was no cowardice to
fill yourself with drink before you faced him.

A drunkard will howl you an obscene chorus the moment after he has wept
about his dead child. For a mind in the delirium of drink is no longer a
coherent whole, but a heap of shattered bits, which it shows one after
the other to the world. Hence the many transformations of that
semi-madness, and their quick variety. Young Gourlay was showing them
now. His had always been a wandering mind, deficient in application and
control, and as he neared his final collapse it became more and more
variable, the prey of each momentary thought. In a short five minutes of
time he had been alive to the beauty of the darkness, cowering before
the memory of his father's eyes, sobbing in self-pity and angry resolve,
shaking in terror--indeed he was shaking now. But his va