and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me.
Our fathers, when they were upon some great enterprise, would
sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite slave into the
foundations of their palace. It was with his own life that my
companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper
single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up
early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear-
wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In
that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of
courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and
doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love
also, for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he
succeeded. But he died, and his paper died after him; and of all
this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes
as if there had come literally nothing.

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under
the mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former
secretary. We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial and
thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all and have no
more behind one than Macbean. And yet of these three, two are gone
and have left less; and this book, perhaps, when it is old and
foxy, and some one picks it up in a corner of a book-shop, and
glances through it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of speech,
and perhaps for the love of ALMA MATER (which may be still extant
and flourishing) buys it, not without haggling, for some pence -
this book may alone preserve a memory of James Walter Ferrier and
Robert Glasgow Brown.

Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they