“There it is; you can judge for yourself,” cried Rob, with sudden exasperation. He jumped up from the table so quickly that his mother had no time to point out his want of manners in getting up in the midst of his dinner. The words were stopped on her lips, when he suddenly placed the block on which he had been drawing before her. Mrs. Glen had not condescended to look at any of these performances before. It would have seemed a sort of acceptance of his excuse had she taken any notice of the “rubbitch” with which he “played himself,” and she had really felt the contempt she expressed. Drawing pictures! it was a kind of childish occupation, an amusement to be pursued on a wet day, when nothing else was possible, or as a solace in the tedium of illness. But when Rob put down before her, relieved against the white table-cloth, the Kirkton itself in little, a very reproduction of the familiar scene she had beheld every day for years, the words were stopped upon his mother’s lips. “Eh!” she cried, in mere excess of emotion, able for nothing but a monosyllable. The very imperfection of it gave it weight in Mrs. Glen’s unpractised eyes. “Losh me!” she cried, when she had recovered the first shock of admiration. “Rob, was it you that did that? are you sure it’s your ain doing?” She could not trust her own eyes. “And poor enough too,” said Rob, but he liked the implied applause: who would not? Praise of what we have done well may satisfy our intellectual faculties, but praise of a failure, that is a thing which really goes to the heart. “Poor! I would like to ken what you mean by poor?” Mrs. Glen pushed away the broth and took up the block in a rapture of surprise and delight. “It’s the very Kirkton itself!” she said; “there’s Robert Jamieson’s house, and there’s Hugh Macfarlane’s, and there’s the way you go to the post, and there’s the Kilnelly burying-ground, and the little road up to the kirk--no a thing missed out. And do you mean to tell me it’s a’ your own doing? Oh, laddie, laddie, the talents you’ve gotten frae Providence! and the little use you make o’ them,” added his mother, with a sudden recollection of the burden of her prophecy against her son, which could not be departed from even now. Rob was so much encouraged that he ventured to laugh. “There is nothing I wish so much as to make more use of them,” he said; “I ought to study and have good teaching.”