The caustic bodie would dander away with a grin, leaving a poor writhing soul. When he reached the Cross he would tell the Deacon blithely of the "fine one he had given him," and the Deacon would lie in wait to give him a fine one too. In Barbie, at least, your returning student is never met at the station with a brass band, whatever may happen in more emotional districts of the North, where it pleases them to shed the tear. "An Arctic Night" was the inspiring theme which Tam set for the Raeburn. "A very appropriate subject!" laughed the fellows; "quite in the style of his own lectures." For Tam, though wise and a humorist, had his prosy hours. He used to lecture on the fifteen characteristics of Lady Macbeth (so he parcelled the unhappy Queen), and he would announce quite gravely, "We will now approach the discussion of the eleventh feature of the lady." Gourlay had a shot at the Raeburn. He could not bring a radiant fullness of mind to bear upon his task (it was not in him to bring), but his morbid fancy set to work of its own accord. He saw a lonely little town far off upon the verge of Lapland night, leagues and leagues across a darkling plain, dark itself and little and lonely in the gloomy splendour of a Northern sky. A ship put to sea, and Gourlay heard in his ears the skirl of the man who went overboard--struck dead by the icy water on his brow, which smote the brain like a tomahawk. He put his hand to his own brow when he wrote that, and, "Yes," he cried eagerly, "it would be the _cold_ would kill the brain! Ooh-ooh, how it would go in!" A world of ice groaned round him in the night; bergs ground on each other and were rent in pain; he heard the splash of great fragments tumbled in the deep, and felt the waves of their distant falling lift the vessel beneath him in the darkness. To the long desolate night came a desolate dawn, and eyes were dazed by the encircling whiteness; yet there flashed green slanting chasms in the ice, and towering pinnacles of sudden rose, lonely and far away. An unknown sea beat upon an unknown shore, and the ship drifted on the pathless waters, a white dead man at the helm. "Yes, by Heaven," cried Gourlay, "I can see it all, I can see it all--that fellow standing at the helm, frozen white and as stiff's an icicle!" Yet, do what he might, he was unable to fill more than half a dozen small pages. He hesitated whether he should send them in, and held them in his inky fingers, thinking he would burn them. He was full of pity for his own inability. "I wish I was a clever chap," he said mournfully. "Ach, well, I'll try my luck," he muttered at last, "though Tam may guy me before the whole class for doing so little o't." The Professor, however (unlike the majority of Scottish professors), rated quality higher than quantity. "I have learned a great deal myself," he announced on the last day of the session--"I have learned a great deal myself from the papers sent in on the subject of an 'Arctic Night.'"