How he loved his evenings--the paraffin lamp glaring beside him, the crackling of the coal in his own fire, the book on his knee! Ancrum had kept his promise, and was helping him with his Greek; but his teaching hardly kept pace with the boy's enthusiasm and capacity. The _voracity_ with which he worked at his Thucydides and Homer left the lame minister staring and sighing. The sound of the lines, the roll of the _oi_'s and _ou_'s was in David's ear all day, and to learn a dozen irregular verbs in the interval between two customers was like the gulping of a dainty. Meanwhile, as he collected his English poets he read them. And here was a whole new world. For in his occupation with the Encyclopaedists he had cared little for poetry. The reaction against his Methodist fit had lasted long, had developed a certain contempt for sentiment, a certain love for all sharp, dry, calculable things, and for the tone of _irony_ in particular. But in such a nature such a phase was sure to pass, and it was passing. Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson--now he was making acquaintance piecemeal with them all, as the precious volumes turned up, which he was soon able to place with a precision which tore them too soon out of his hands. The Voltairean temper in him was melting, was passing into something warmer, subtler, and more restless. But he was not conscious of it. He was as secular, as cocksure, as irritating as ever, when Ancrum probed him on the subject of the Hall of Science or the various Secularist publications which he supported. 'Do you call yourself an atheist now, David?' said Ancrum one day, in that cheerful, half-ironic tone which the young bookseller resented. 'I don't call myself anything,' said David, stoutly. 'I'm all for this world; we can't know anything about another. At least, that's my opinion, sir--no offence to you.' 'Oh, dear me, no offence! There have been a _few_ philosophers, you know, Davy, since Voltaire. There's a person called Kant; I don't know anything about him, but they tell me he made out a very pretty case, on the practical side anyway, for a God and immortality. And in England, too, there have been two or three persons of consequence, you remember, like Coleridge and John Henry Newman, who have thought it worth while to believe a little. But you don't care about that?' The lad stood silent a moment, his colour rising, his fine lip curling. Then he burst out: 'What's the good of thinking about things by the wrong end? There's such a lot to read!' And with a great stretch of all his young frame he fell back on the catalogue he was looking through, while Ancrum went on turning over a copy of 'The Reasoner,' a vigorous Secularist paper of the day, which he had found on the counter, and which had suggested his question.