In a street through which I used to walk homeward was an old book shop, piled and fringed outside and in with books of every age, size, and colour. And here I at last summoned courage to stop, and timidly and stealthily taking out some volume whose title attracted me, snatch hastily a few pages and hasten on, half fearful of being called on to purchase, half ashamed of a desire which I fancied every one else considered as unlawful as my mother did. Sometimes I was lucky enough to find the same volume several days running, and to take up the subject where I had left it off; and thus I contrived to hurry through a great deal of "Childe Harold," "Lara," and the "Corsair"--a new world of wonders to me. They fed, those poems, both my health and my diseases; while they gave me, little of them as I could understand, a thousand new notions about scenery and man, a sense of poetic melody and luxuriance as yet utterly unknown. They chimed in with all my discontent, my melancholy, my thirst after any life of action and excitement, however frivolous, insane, or even worse. I forgot the Corsair's sinful trade in his free and daring life; rather, I honestly eliminated the bad element--in which, God knows, I took no delight--and kept the good one. However that might be, the innocent--guilty pleasure grew on me day by day. Innocent, because human--guilty, because disobedient. But have I not paid the penalty? One evening, however, I fell accidentally on a new book--"The Life and Poems of J. Bethune." I opened the story of his life--became interested, absorbed--and there I stood, I know not how long, on the greasy pavement, heedless of the passers who thrust me right and left, reading by the flaring gas-light that sad history of labour, sorrow, and death.--How the Highland cotter, in spite of disease, penury, starvation itself, and the daily struggle to earn his bread by digging and ditching, educated himself--how he toiled unceasingly with his hands--how he wrote his poems in secret on dirty scraps of paper and old leaves of books--how thus he wore himself out, manful and godly, "bating not a jot of heart or hope," till the weak flesh would bear no more; and the noble spirit, unrecognized by the lord of the soil, returned to God who gave it. I seemed to see in his history a sad presage of my own. If he, stronger, more self-restrained, more righteous far than ever I could be, had died thus unknown, unassisted, in the stern battle with social disadvantages, what must be my lot? And tears of sympathy, rather than of selfish fear, fell fast upon the book. A harsh voice from the inner darkness of the shop startled me. "Hoot, laddie, ye'll better no spoil my books wi' greeting ower them." I replaced the book hastily, and was hurrying on, but the same voice called me back in a more kindly tone. "Stop a wee, my laddie. I'm no angered wi' ye. Come in, and we'll just ha' a bit crack thegither."