He turned to his equation: it had cleared itself up; he worked it out in five minutes. Betty came to tell him that the dinner was ready, and he went down, peaceful and hopeful, to his grandmother. While at home he never worked in the evenings: it was bad enough to have to do so at college. Hence nature had a chance with him again. Blessings on the wintry blasts that broke into the first youth of Summer! They made him feel what summer was! Blessings on the cheerless days of rain, and even of sleet and hail, that would shove the reluctant year back into January. The fair face of Spring, with her tears dropping upon her quenchless smiles, peeped in suppressed triumph from behind the growing corn and the budding sallows on the river-bank. Nay, even when the snow came once more in defiance of calendars, it was but a background from which the near genesis should 'stick fiery off.' In general he had a lonely walk after his lesson with Miss St. John was over: there was no one at Rothieden to whom his heart and intellect both were sufficiently drawn to make a close friendship possible. He had companions, however: Ericson had left his papers with him. The influence of these led him into yet closer sympathy with Nature and all her moods; a sympathy which, even in the stony heart of London, he not only did not lose but never ceased to feel. Even there a breath of wind would not only breathe upon him, it would breathe into him; and a sunset seen from the Strand was lovely as if it had hung over rainbow seas. On his way home he would often go into one of the shops where the neighbours congregated in the evenings, and hold a little talk; and although, with Miss St. John filling his heart, his friend's poems his imagination, and geometry and algebra his intellect, great was the contrast between his own inner mood and the words by which he kept up human relations with his townsfolk, yet in after years he counted it one of the greatest blessings of a lowly birth and education that he knew hearts and feelings which to understand one must have been young amongst them. He would not have had a chance of knowing such as these if he had been the son of Dr. Anderson and born in Aberdeen. CHAPTER XIX. ROBERT MEDIATES.