On his way back from the tavern he would meet, perhaps, the Paymaster making for the house of the Sergeant More. “I cannot understood,” would the Paymaster say, “what makes you take your drams in so common a civilian house as that. A man and a soldier keeps the Abercrombie, a fellow who fought for his country. And look at the company! MacNicol and Major Hall--and--and--myself and some of the best in the burgh; yet you must be frequenting a low tavern with only merchants and mice and fisherman to say ‘Good health’ to.” Master Brooks had always his answer very pat. “I get a great abundance of old war tales in my books,” he would say drily. “And told with a greater ingenuity--not to mention veracity--than pertain to the legends and histories of you old campaigners. Between ourselves, I’m not for war at all, but for the far finer and more wholesome rarity called peace. Captain, Captain!” (and here would he grasp the Paymaster by the coat lapels with the friendly freedom of an old acquaintance,) “Captain, Captain! it is not a world for war though we are the fools to be fancying so, but a world for good-fellowship, so short the period we have of it, so wonderful the mind of them about us, so kind with all their faults! I find more of the natural human in the back room of Kate’s there where the merchants discourse upon their bales and accounts than I would among your half-pay gentry who would have the country knee-deep in blood every day in the calendar if they had their way of it.” “It’s aye the old story with you,” the Paymaster would say tolerantly. “You cannot see that if this country has not its wars and rumours of wars, its marchings-off and weedings-out, it would die of a rot. I hope you are not putting too many notions of that clerkly kind in the boy’s head. Eh? I would be vexed to have my plans for him spoiled and a possible good soldier turned into a swindling writer.” “The boy’s made, Captain Campbell,” said the schoolmaster one day at this. “He was made and his end appointed ere ever he came to your house or felt my ferule-end. He is of the dream nature and he will be what he will be. I can no more fashion him to the common standard than I can make the fir-tree like unto the juniper. I’ve had many a curious student yonder, wild and tame, dunce and genius, but this one baffles me. He was a while up in the glen school, they tell me, and he learned there such rudiments as he has, but what he knows best was never learned anywhere but as the tinkler learns--by the roadside and in the wood.” “I know he’s a droll one,” said the Paymaster, uneasily, with a thoughtful brow, “but you have the reputation, Mr. Brooks, you have turned out lads who were a credit to you. If it is not in him, thwack it in with your tawse.”