But soon the bitter draught of disappointment began to breed harsher thoughts in me. Those fine gentlemen who rode past me in the park, who rolled by in carriages, sitting face to face with ladies, as richly dressed, if not as beautiful, as she was--they could see her when they liked--why not I? What right had their eyes to a feast denied to mine? They, too, who did not appreciate, adore that beauty as I did--for who could worship her like me? At least they had not suffered for her as I had done; they had not stood in rain and frost, fatigue, and blank despair--watching--watching--month after month; and I was making coats for them! The very garment I was stitching at, might, in a day's time, be in her presence--touching her dress; and its wearer bowing, and smiling, and whispering--he had not bought that bliss by watching in the ram. It made me mad to think of it. I will say no more about it. That is a period of my life on which I cannot even now look back without a shudder. At last, after perhaps a year or more, I summoned up courage to tell my story to Sandy Mackaye, and burst out with complaints more pardonable, perhaps, than reasonable. "Why have I not as good a right to speak to her, to move in the same society in which she moves, as any of the fops of the day? Is it because these aristocrats are more intellectual than I? I should not fear to measure brains against most of them now; and give me the opportunities which they have, and I would die if I did not outstrip them. Why have I not those opportunities? Is that fault of others to be visited on me? Is it because they are more refined than I? What right have they, if this said refinement be so necessary a qualification, a difference so deep--that, without it, there is to be an everlasting gulf between man and man--what right have they to refuse to let me share in it, to give me the opportunity of acquiring it?" "Wad ye ha' them set up a dancing academy for working men, wi' 'manners tocht here to the lower classes'? They'll no break up their ain monopoly; trust them for it! Na: if ye want to get amang them, I'll tell ye the way o't. Write a book o' poems, and ca' it 'A Voice fra' the Goose, by a working Tailor'--and then--why, after a dizen years or so of starving and scribbling for your bread, ye'll ha' a chance o' finding yoursel' a lion, and a flunkey, and a licker o' trenchers--ane that jokes for his dinner, and sells his soul for a fine leddy's smile--till ye presume to think they're in earnest, and fancy yoursel' a man o' the same blude as they, and fa' in love wi' one o' them--and then they'll teach you your level, and send ye off to gauge whusky like Burns, or leave ye' to die in a ditch as they did wi' puir Thom." "Let me die, anywhere or anyhow, if I can but be near her--see her--"