"Well, give it to me; I 'll classify it with 'Economics and Sociology'. There will be more of this kind, I 'm sure. Let's go on with the work or we shan't be through before midnight. Look up the 'Lives' and 'Letters', and 'Autobiographies' next. I want to put them on the upper shelf--" "I know;" he nodded approvingly; "so they will be at your elbow when, of a winter's evening, you want to reach out your hand, without much trouble, and find a companion. Well, give me a little time to look them over." I watched him for a few minutes, as he took up book after book, examined the title, sometimes turned the leaves rapidly, and again opened to some particular page and lost himself for a moment. Jamie was showing me another side than that to which I had grown accustomed in our daily intercourse. I sat down while I was waiting, for I was tired. Mrs. Macleod was reading. "Are you ready now?" I asked, after waiting a quarter of an hour, and still no sound from behind the pile of books across the table. "M-hm, in a minute." His mother looked up, and we both saw that he was absorbed in something. Mrs. Macleod smiled indulgently. "That's always his way with a book--lost to everything around him. He would n't hear a word we said if we were to talk here for an hour." "I 'll make him hear." I spoke positively, and again Mrs. Macleod smiled. "Jamie--I would like a few books, the 'Lives' and 'Letters'." For answer he burst into a roar that roused the dogs under the table. He slapped his hand on his knee, threw his leg over the arm of the easy chair, and settled into an attitude that indicated, there would be no more work gotten out of him for the rest of the evening. Suddenly he shouted again. "Here 's a man for you!" he said joyfully. "Who?" I demanded, but might have spared myself the question. There was another interval of silence, followed by an uproarious outburst: "Oh, I do love Stevenson's 'damns'! They 're great! Hear this--" He read a portion of a letter which included a choicely selected expletive. "Jamie!" It was a decided protest on his mother's part; but I laughed aloud, for I, too, knew what he meant. I, too, loved the varied and picturesque "damns" of those letters that had been so much to me in the past few years. As I looked at Jamie, another Scotsman, with the thin bright eager face, I knew at once that, without realizing it, I had connected his appearance with that of Robert Louis Stevenson, his countryman. And how like the two spirits were! "I wonder," I said to myself, "I wonder if this same Jamie Macleod also has the inner impulse to write!" And, having said that in thought, I looked at Jamie Macleod through different glasses. We let him mercifully alone; but I went on with my work, reading titles, classifying, placing, finding genuine pleasure in speculating on the "calibre" of the owner. At nine, Marie entered with the porridge; Cale followed her.