A year later, as he strode upward amid high-growing bracken, on that Saturday in June, he saw the same beauty, and it was undimmed, untarnished by labour and disappointment. The joy of knowing had been Alexander's all his life, and he had suffered sincerely at the discovery that most boys were dull to its delight, and spent their energies in escaping it. He had lived through some haggard months in trying to lure them with careful morsels, but he had ended by administering learning like medicine and under no disguise. But if here he felt himself cheated, there still lived and grew in him the early belief that in all he did and was he would be helping to fashion men, and, as he stood to give a lesson, he knew that the character of Alexander Rutherford was of more importance to these indifferent listeners than the words of Virgil. There was a cause for humility, and an inspiration, and if, in that first year, Alexander watched his soul and his thoughts overmuch, it was but the fault of his earnestness and his youth, and, outside his work, he was not given to self-analysis, that frequent offspring of self-pity. He was not sorry for himself: the brooding time of his boyhood was past, and now, even when anxiety had its claws in him, and he hurried home from school in fear of what he should find, he was conscious of an underflow of happiness as ceaseless as the streams he loved, whose voices were always with him as he followed the track his own feet had made. The sound came in changing volume through the curtain of the mist as though, behind that grey wrapping, doors were opened and then shut. On these days of dripping quiet, the water cried, but there were others when it chuckled between its babbling sentences, or roared in its fury to reach the sea.