“I do not think any man will ever define them for you.  But you may go through a course of experiences, more severe, probably, than pleasant, which may enable you at last to define them for yourself.”

“Have you defined them?” asked Tom, bluntly, glancing round at his companion.

“Faith?—­Yes, I trust.  Humility?—­No, I fear.”

“I should like to hear your definition of the former, at least.”

“Did I not say that you must discover it for yourself?”

“Yes.  Well.  When the lesson comes, if it does come, I suppose it will come in some learnable shape; and till then, I must shift for myself—­ and if self-dependence he a punishable sin, I shall, at all events, have plenty of company whithersoever I go.  There is Lord Scoutbush and Trebooze!”

Why did not Campbell speak his mind more clearly to Thurnall?

Because he knew that with such men words are of little avail.  The disease was entrenched too strongly in the very centre of the man’s being.  It seemed at moments as if all his strange adventures and hairbreadth escapes had been sent to do him harm, and not good; to pamper and harden his self-confidence, not to crush it.  Therefore Campbell seldom argued with him:  but he prayed for him often; for he had begun, as all did who saw much of Tom Thurnall, to admire and respect him, in spite of all his faults.

And now, turning through a woodland path, they descend toward the river, till they can hear voices below them; Scoutbush laughing quietly, Trebooze laying down the law at the top of his voice.

“How noisy the fellow is, and how he is hopping about!” says Campbell.

“No wonder:  he has been soaking, I hear, for the last fortnight, with some worthy compeers, by way of keeping off cholera.  I must have my eye on him to-day.”

Scrambling down through the brushwood, they found themselves in such a scene as Creswick alone knows how to paint:  though one element of beauty, which Creswick uses full well, was wanting; and the whole place was seen, not by slant sun-rays, gleaming through the boughs, and dappling all the pebbles with a lacework of leaf shadows, but in the uniform and sober grey of dawn.

A broad bed of shingle, looking just now more like an ill-made turnpike road than the bed of Alva stream; above it, a long shallow pool, which showed every stone through the transparent water; on the right, a craggy bank, bedded with deep wood sedge and orange-tipped king ferns, clustering beneath sallow and maple bushes already tinged with gold; on the left, a long bar of gravel, covered with giant “butter-bur” leaves; in and out of which the hounds are brushing—­beautiful black-and-tan dogs, of which poor Trebooze may be pardonably proud; while round the burleaf-bed dances a rough white Irish terrier, seeming, by his frantic self-importance, to consider himself the master of the hounds.