“I consider him possessed of a kind of heavenly common sense, equally at home in the truths of divine relation, and the facts of the human struggle with nature and her forces. I should never have discovered my own ignorance in certain points of the mathematics but for the questions that boy put to me before he was twelve years of age. A thing not understood lay in his mind like a fretting foreign body. But there is a far more important factor concerned than this exceptional degree of insight. Understanding is the reward of obedience. Peter says, ‘the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given them that _obey_ him.’ Obedience is the key to every door. I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters, he will talk, and speculate, and try to feel, but he will not set himself to _do_. It is different with Malcolm. From the first he has been trying to obey. Nor do I see why it should be strange that even a child should understand these things, if they are the very elements of the region for which we were created and to which our being holds essential relations, as a bird to the air, or a fish to the sea. If a man may not understand the things of God whence he came, what shall he understand?” “How, then, is it that so few do understand?” “Because where they know, so few obey. This boy, I say, did. If you had seen, as I have, the almost superhuman struggles of his will to master the fierce temper his ancestors gave him, you would marvel less at what he has so early become. I have seen him, white with passion, cast himself on his face on the shore, and cling with his hands to the earth as if in a paroxysm of bodily suffering; then after a few moments rise and do a service to the man who had wronged him. Were it any wonder if the light should have soon gone up in a soul like that? When I was a younger man I used to go out with the fishing-boats now and then, drawn chiefly by my love for the boy, who earned his own bread that way before he was in his teens. One night we were caught in a terrible storm, and had to stand out to sea in the pitch dark. He was then not fourteen. ‘Can you let a boy like that steer?’ I said to the captain of the boat. ‘Yes; just a boy like that,’ he answered. ‘Ma’colm ’ill steer as straucht ’s a porpus.’ When he was relieved, he crept over the thwarts to where I sat. ‘_Is_ there any true definition of a straight line, sir?’ he said. ‘I can’t take the one in my Euclid.’--‘So you’re not afraid, Malcolm?’ I returned, heedless of his question, for I wanted to see what he would answer. ‘Afraid, sir!’ he rejoined with some surprise, ‘I wad ill like to hear the Lord say, _O thou o’ little faith!_’--‘But,’ I persisted, ‘God may mean to drown you!’--‘An’ what for no?’ he returned. ‘Gien ye war to tell me ’at I micht be droon’t ohn him meant it, I wad be fleyt eneuch.’ I see your ladyship does not understand: I will interpret the dark saying: ‘And why should he not