The starting time was decided on that night, and shortly after we set out, the whole rejoicing band of us, upon a bracing frosty morning, late in October, on the top of the coach for Edinburgh. Maxwell managed to get up a few tears for his mother’s especial benefit. I had nearly joined him myself, I recollect, when I saw her pale anxious face lifted up so tenderly to the high perch where we were crowded together. Never human face had worn that look for me, and my heart warmed the more to the son of this sad mother, even while I almost envied him. All the rest of us were motherless; but even the gruff “Good-bye, boys,” of Murrayshaugh had some feeling in it this morning; and Lucy Murray’s eyes were too heavy to be raised to us, as she stood by her father’s side. Then there was a small white hand waving a handkerchief from within the high holly hedge of Greenshaw as we passed. It perhaps was not all for her brother. I appropriated, with trembling, some share of the farewell. In a very short time we had settled down to our respective studies. It is comparatively unusual in Scotland to give youths the benefit of college education except for some special profession; so that, put the learned faculties aside, and you leave but a small residuum to represent what forms the larger proportion of students in England. It is perhaps for this reason that we are more practical than our neighbours; that those niceties of profound classical learning which form the glory on the head of English universities--those painful researches into the nature of the Greek verb, and folio disputations on contested words, do scarcely exist among us. But that by the way. We were very frank, very unsophisticated, very innocent, we Fendie lads; and even, as I fancy, very little less so when we left than when we entered Edinburgh. It has its abundant temptations, no doubt, as all other towns have, but, so far as I myself saw, we came through them with tolerable safety. Faults of mind, and temper, and spirit, we had many, but I think we, in a great degree, escaped that round of petty vices, the assumed manliness of which leads so many foolish lads astray. CHAPTER IV. I walk as ere I walked forlorn When all our path was fresh with dew And all the bugle breezes blew Reveillée to the breaking morn.--IN MEMORIAM. I am looking out from the deep window of my study, through the sharp air of a frosty, clear November night. There are lights gleaming in some cottage windows, so far down under the bare trees by the water-side, that you would think them glow-worms on the grass; and silvery mists are floating about the sky, and yonder lie some great distant mountain clouds, with stars embayed in creeks and inlets at their feet, like lights of anchored ships.