“There is little chance that I will be able to return till I am old, Adam,” he said to me, sadly, as we lingered on our favourite walk for the last time, looking down on the Old Town through the balmy dim spring night; “and if I should come home as rich as old Major Wardlaw of the Elms, what then? One would scarcely like to look forward to such an end of one’s labours. His gouty chair, and his hot unwholesome room, and his solitude, and his grumbling, and his spiceries, and his inflammable temper. Man, Adam! to think that I must leave home, and part with Lucy and with all of you, and toil through my whole life where I shall never hear a Scotch tongue, for such an end as that!” “You will hear many Scotch tongues in Bombay, Hew,” said I, “and then you are sure to marry somebody’s daughter, and come home immediately.” Hew’s frank happy laugh rang into the dim air pleasantly; its sound always cheered me, but the remembrance that I might not hear it again for years fell upon me in blank pain. We made a great many hysterical attempts after that to be merry, but failed so woefully in every case, that we turned at last in silence round the brow of the hill, and looked out upon the sea: the noble Firth spreading its silvery lengths far away in the distance, with its dark islands and steady lights, and the broad line of its princely highway leading forth into the foreign world! The cold, strange, alien world where home was not, nor friends. Hew Murray’s hand grasped my arm for a moment with a convulsive pressure, and there were tears under our eyelids,--tears which we were not ashamed to shed under cover of the gentle night. The next day I watched a white sail gliding smoothly over the peaceful Firth, until I lost it on the horizon far away--and my dearest friend was gone. For Charlie Graeme, brother-like as we were, was less closely joined to me than Hew. It is a vulgar notion that the warmest friendship requires a contrast of minds. Charlie and I had very distinct individualizations. Hew resembled me closely--I had almost said, that in matters of the mind and heart Hew Murray and I had all things common. In things physical there was the same connection between my cousin and myself; but heartily as I liked Charlie, there were many points on which I certainly knew that we could by no possibility agree; there were many matters of feeling and thought which I shrank from bringing under his keen glance--that glance which pierced through my bashful sentimentalities with so little pity.