But, after all, that first plunge into city-life had had something of the excitement of novelty; it was the settling down thereafter to the dull monotonous round of labour, in this lonely lodging, with the melancholy gray world of mist surrounding him and shutting him in, that was to test the strength of his resolve. The first day was not so bad; for now and again he would relieve the slow tedium of the hours by doing a little carpentering about the room; and the sharp sound of hammer and nail served to break in upon that hushed, slumberous murmur of the great city without that seemed a mournful, distant, oppressive thing. But the next day of this solitary life (for it was not until the end of the week he was to see Mr. Weems) was dreadful. The dull, silent gray hours would not go by. Wrestling with Ewart’s _Agricultural Assistant_, or Balfour’s _Elements of Botany_, or with distressing problems in land-surveying or timber-measuring, he would think the time had passed; and then, going to the window for a moment’s relief to eye and brain, he would see by the clock of the railway station that barely half an hour had elapsed since last he had looked at the obdurate hands. How he envied the porters, the cab-drivers, the men who were loading and unloading the waggons; they seemed all so busy and contented; they were getting through with their work; they had something to show for their labour; they had companions to talk to and joke with; sometimes he thought he could hear them laughing. And ah, how much more he envied the traveller who drove up and got leisurely out of the cab, and had his luggage carried into the station, himself following and disappearing from view! Whither was he going, then, away from this great, melancholy city, with its slow hours, and wan skies, and dull, continuous, stupefying murmur? Whither, indeed!—away by the silver links of Forth, perhaps, with the castled rock of Stirling rising into the windy blue and white; away by the wooded banks of Allan Water and the bonny Braes of Doune; by Strathyre, and Glenogle, and Glenorchy; and past the towering peaks of Ben Cruachan, and out to the far-glancing waters of the western seas. Indeed it is a sore pity that Miss Carry Hodson, in a fit of temper, had crushed together and thrust into the bottom of the boat the newspaper containing an estimate of Ronald’s little Highland poem; if only she had handed it on to him, he would have learned that the sentiment of nostalgia is too slender and fallacious a thing for any sensible person to bother his head about; and, instead of wasting his time in gazing at the front of a railway station, he would have gone resolutely back to Strachan’s _Agricultural Tables_ and the measuring and mapping of surface areas. On the third day he grew desperate.