They turned to the right, and sauntered aimlessly along down the broad pavement, pausing now and again to glance over some tradesman’s display, then drifting onward again, close together. Before a bookseller’s window at a corner they made a more considerable halt. Mosscrop scanned the rows of titles minutely, talking as he did so. Thus between comments on the volumes they looked at, and idle remarks on subjects which these suggested, she picked up this further account of her new friend’s affairs. “I told you I was a Scotchman,” he said. “I was the son of a factor, a sort of steward over a biggish estate, and I never did anything but go to school from the earliest moment I can remember. It is as if I was born in a class-room, and cradled on a blackboard. It is a terrible land for that; tuition broods over it like a pestilence. Their idea is to make of each child’s brain a sort of intellectual haggis; the more different kinds of stuff there are in it, the greater the fame of the teacher and the pride of the parents. I shudder now when I think how much I knew at the age of twelve. As for my eighteenth year, when I took the Strathbogie exhibition, Confucius, John Knox, and Lord Bacon rolled in one would have been frightened of me. My information was appalling. My mother died from sheer excess of astonishment at having given birth to such a prodigy. My father took to drink. The magnificence of my attainments not only threw him off his balance--it debauched the entire district. It is the law of history, you know, that communities and nations progress to a certain point, achieve some crowning deed in a golden age of splendid productiveness, and then wither and go off to seed. Well, my parish, having produced me, reached its climax. Industry flagged, enterprise died down; the very land ceased to grow as much corn to the acre as formerly. The people could do nothing but congregate at the taverns and discuss with bated breath my meteoric progress across the academic heavens. Oh, I was a most remarkable young man! “It happened that there was also a remarkable old man in my neighbourhood. He came from nobody in particular, and went away young. People had long since forgotten that there had been such a lad, when one day he returned to us, well along in years, and infamously rich. I don’t mean that he had come wrongfully by his money. God knows how he got it; the story ran that it had something to do with smoked fish. Whatever its source, his wealth was wanton, preposterous, criminal in its dimensions. He had no kith or kin remaining to him. Of course we knew he would build and endow an educational establishment. All rich old Scotchmen do that, as an ordinary matter. They have reared for us such myriads of brand-new colleges and seminaries on every hillside that I marvel even the rabbits and pheasants can escape learning to spell. There are logarithms in the very atmosphere.