He could not conceive how he had been so deluded, as to suppose that he had any right to expect friendship from the gentleman he had applied to. He felt that in so doing he acted with the greenness of a boy, and he was mortified at his own softness. Had there been any reciprocity of obligations between his father and the gentleman, the case would have been different. ‘Had they been for forty or fifty years,’ thought he, ‘in the mutual interchange of mercantile dependence, then perhaps I might have had some claim, and, no doubt, it would have been answered, but I was a fool to mistake civilities for friendship.’ Perhaps, however, had the case been even as strong as he put it, he might still have found himself quite as much deceived. ‘As to making any appeal to my uncle, that was none of his business,’ said he to himself. ‘I did not ask the fellow for advice, I solicited but a small favour. There is no such heart-scalding insolence as in refusing a solicitation, to refer the suppliant to others, and with prudential admonitions too--curse him who would beg, were it not to avoid doing worse.’ This brave humour lasted for the length of more than a mile’s walk, during which the young soldier marched briskly along, whistling courageous tunes, and flourishing his stick with all the cuts of the broadsword, lopping the boughs of the hedges, as if they had been the limbs of Frenchmen, and switching away the heads of the thistles and benweeds in his path, as if they had been Parisian carmagnols, against whom, at that period, the loyalty of the British bosom was beginning to grow fretful and testy. But the greater part of the next mile was less animated--occasionally, cowardly thoughts glimmered palely through the glorious turbulence of youthful heroism, and once or twice he paused and looked back towards Glasgow, wondering if there was any other in all that great city, who might be disposed to lend him the hundred pounds he had begged for his outfit. ‘There is not one,’ said he, and he sighed, but in a moment after he exclaimed, ‘and who the devil cares? It does not do for soldiers to think much; let them do their duty at the moment; that’s all they have to think of; I will go on in the track I have chosen, and trust to Fortune for a windfall;’ again ‘In the Garb of Old Gaul’ was gallantly whistled, and again the hedges and thistles felt the weight of his stick. But as he approached Camrachle, his mood shifted into the minor key, and when the hazel bank and the ash-trees, with the nests of the magpies in them, appeared in sight, the sonorous bravery of the Highland march became gradually modulated into a low and querulous version of ‘Lochaber no more’, and when he discovered the carriage at his mother’s door, his valour so subsided into boyish bashfulness, that he shrank away, as we have already mentioned, and did not venture to go home, till he saw that his uncle had left the house.