of Spring. But he had been pitchforked out of that old happy world and
could never enter it again. Alas! for the roadside fire, the cosy inn,
the Compleat Angler, the Chavender or Chub!

And yet--and yet! He had done the right thing, though the Lord
alone knew how it would end. He began to pluck courage from his
very melancholy, and hope from his reflections upon the transitoriness
of life. He was austerely following Romance as he conceived it, and
if that capricious lady had taken one dream from him she might yet
reward him with a better. Tags of poetry came into his head which
seemed to favour this philosophy--particularly some lines of
Browning on which he used to discourse to his Kirk Literary Society.
Uncommon silly, he considered, these homilies of his must have been,
mere twitterings of the unfledged. But now he saw more in the lines,
a deeper interpretation which he had earned the right to make.


"Oh world, where all things change and nought abides,
Oh life, the long mutation--is it so?
Is it with life as with the body's change?--
Where, e'en tho' better follow, good must pass."



That was as far as he could get, though he cudgelled his memory
to continue. Moralizing thus, he became drowsy, and was almost
asleep when the train drew up at the station of Kirkmichael.