"Well, but," I asked again, "is not complete freedom of thought a glorious aim--to emancipate man's noblest part--the intellect--from the trammels of custom and ignorance?" "Intellect--intellect!" rejoined he, according to his fashion, catching one up at a word, and playing on that in order to answer, not what one said, but what one's words led to. "I'm sick o' all the talk anent intellect I hear noo. An' what's the use o' intellect? 'Aristocracy o' intellect,' they cry. Curse a' aristocracies--intellectual anes, as well as anes o' birth, or rank, or money! What! will I ca' a man my superior, because he's cleverer than mysel?--will I boo down to a bit o' brains, ony mair than to a stock or a stane? Let a man prove himsel' better than me, my laddie--honester, humbler, kinder, wi' mair sense o' the duty o' man, an' the weakness o' man--and that man I'll acknowledge--that man's my king, my leader, though he war as stupid as Eppe Dalgleish, that could na count five on her fingers, and yet keepit her drucken father by her ain hands' labour for twenty-three yeers." We could not agree to all this, but we made a rule of never contradicting the old sage in one of his excited moods, for fear of bringing on a week's silent fit--a state which generally ended in his smoking himself into a bilious melancholy; but I made up my mind to be henceforth a frequent auditor of Mr. Windrush's oratory. "An' sae the deevil's dead!" said Sandy, half to himself, as he sat crooning and smoking that night over the fire. "Gone at last, puir fallow!--an' he sae little appreciated, too! Every gowk laying his ain sins on Nickie's back, puir Nickie!--verra like that much misunderstood politeecian, Mr. John Cade, as Charles Buller ca'd him in the Hoose o' Commons--an' he to be dead at last! the warld'll seem quite unco without his auld-farrant phizog on the streets. Aweel, aweel--aiblins he's but shammin'.-- "When pleasant Spring came on apace, And showers began to fa', John Barleycorn got up again, And sore surprised them a'. "At ony rate, I'd no bury him till he began smell a wee strong like. It's a grewsome thing, is premature interment, Alton, laddie!" CHAPTER XXIII. THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. But all this while, my slavery to Mr. O'Flynn's party-spirit and coarseness was becoming daily more and more intolerable--an explosion was inevitable; and an explosion came. Mr. O'Flynn found out that I had been staying at Cambridge, and at a cathedral city too; and it was quite a godsend to him to find any one who knew a word about the institutions at which he had been railing weekly for years. So nothing would serve him but my writing a set of articles on the universities, as a prelude to one on the Cathedral Establishments. In vain I pleaded the shortness of my stay there, and the smallness of my information.