“It was me he took for the tutor, I suppose?” said the strange Mentor who had thus taken possession of Colin; and the tall student laughed with a kind of quaint gratification. “And so I might have been if I had been bred up at Oxford or Cambridge,” he added, after a moment; “that is to say, if it had been my lot to be bred up anywhere; but they’ve a grand system in these English universities. _That_ was not the Duke,” he said interrogatively, looking at Colin, whose blood of clansman boiled at the idea. “_That_ the Duke!” exclaimed the boy with great disdain; “no more than I am. It’s one of the English that are aye coming and making their jokes about the rain; as if anybody wanted them to come,” said Colin, with an outbreak of scorn; and then the boy remembered that Archie Candlish had just bought a house in expectation of such visitors, and stopped abruptly in full career. “I suppose the English are awfu’ fond of grouse, or they wouldna’ come so far for two or three birds,” he continued, in a tone of milder sarcasm. But his companion was not to be so easily diverted from his questions. “Grouse is a grand institution, and helps in the good government of this country,” said Lauderdale, “and, through this country, of the world--which is a fine thought for a bit winged creature, if it had the sense to ken. Yon’s another world,” he said, after a little pause, “no Paradise to be sure, but something as far removed from this as Heaven itself; farther, you might say, for there’s many a poor man down below here that’s hovering on the edge of heaven. And how came you to have such grand friends?” asked the self-constituted guardian, stooping from his lofty height to look straight into Colin’s eyes. After a time, he extracted the baldest narrative that ever was uttered by a hero ashamed of his prowess from the half-indignant boy, and managed to guess as clearly as the wonderful little lady in the carriage the nature of Colin’s sentiments towards the young antagonist and rival whom he had saved. “I wouldna have let a dog drown,” said the aggrieved Colin; “there was nothing to make a work about. But you would have laughed to see that fellow, with his boots like a lassie’s and feared to wet his feet. He could swim, though,” added the boy, candidly; “and I would like to beat him,” he said, after a moment; “I’d like to run races with him for something, and win the prize over his head.” This was all Colin permitted himself to say; but the vehement sentiment thus recalled to his mind made him, for the moment, less attentive to Lauderdale, who, for his part, was considerably moved by his young companion’s excitement. “I’m not going to see your fine friends,” he said, as he parted from the boy at the “stairfoot” which led to Colin’s lodging; “but there’s many a true word spoken in jest, and, my boy, you shall not want a tutor, though there’s no such thing in our Scotch colleges.”