Johnny was no longer kept outside the minister’s door. In his red gown, as a student of St. Rule’s, he was as good as anyone, and the childish alliance, which had long existed between him and Rodie, was still kept up, although Rodie’s fictitious enthusiasm for beasts, which was merely a reflection from his friend’s, had altogether failed, and he was as ready as any one to laugh at the pottering in all the sea-pools, and patient observation of all the strange creatures’ ways, which kept Wemyss busy all the time he could spare from his lectures and his essays, and the composition of the sermons which a theological student at St. Mary’s College was bound, periodically, to produce. Those tastes of his were already recognised as very absurd and rather amusing, but very good things to keep a laddie out of mischief, Mrs. Buchanan said; for it was evident that he could not be “carrying on” in any foolish way, so long as he spent his afternoons out on the caller sands, with his wee spy-glass, examining the creatures, how they were made, and all about them, though it was a strange taste for a young man. Several times he had, indeed, brought a basin full of sea-water--carrying it through the streets, not at all put out by the amusement which surrounded him, the school-boys that followed at his heels, the sharp looks which his acquaintances gave each other, convinced now that Johnny Wemyss had certainly a bee in his bonnet--to the minister’s house, that Miss Elsie might see the wonderful white and pink creatures, like sea-flowers, the strange sea-anemones, rooted on bits of rock, and waving their tentacles, or shutting them up in a moment at a rude touch. Elsie, much disposed to laugh at first, when the strange youth brought her this still stranger trophy, gradually came to admire, and wonder, and take great notice of the sea-anemones, which were wonderfully pretty, though so queer--and which, after all, she began to think, it was quite as clever of Johnny Wemyss to have discovered, as it was of the Alicks and Ralphs to shoot the wild-fowl at the mouth of the Eden. It was even vaguely known that he wrote to some queer scientific fishy societies about them, and received big letters by the post, “costing siller,” or sometimes franked in the corner with long, sprawling signatures of peers, or members of parliament. People, however, would not believe that these letters could be about Johnny Wemyss’s beasts; they thought that this must simply be a pretence to make himself and his rubbish of importance, and that it must be something else which procured him these correspondents, though what, they could not tell.