PROF.  D. Then you are here on a visit.  Where are you staying?

C. No, I live here.  I am studying in the Slade schools.

PROF.  D. This must have greatly changed my dear old friend’s life!

C. I did not know that you were acquainted with my grandfather.

PROF.  D. I was one of his pupils.  I may say that I owe everything to him.  It is long since I have been at Darkglade, but it always seemed to me an ideal place.

C. Rather out of the world.

PROF.  D. Of one sort of world perhaps; but what a beautiful combination is to be seen there of the highest powers with the lowliest work!  So entirely has he dedicated himself that he really feels the guidance of a ploughman’s soul a higher task than the grandest achievement in science or literature.  By the bye, I hope he will take up his pen again.  It is really wanted.  Will you give him a message from me?

C. How strange!  I never knew that he was an author.

PROF.  D. Ah! you are a young thing, and these are abstruse subjects.

C. Oh! the Fathers and Ritual, I suppose?

PROF.  D. No doubt he is a great authority there, as a man of his ability must be; but I was thinking of a course of scientific papers he put forth ten years ago, taking up the arguments against materialism as no one could do who is not as thoroughly at home as he is in the latest discoveries and hypotheses.  He ought to answer that paper in the CRITICAL WORLD.

C. I was so much interested in that paper.

PROF.  D. It has just the speciousness that runs away with young people.  I should like to talk it over with him.  Do you think I should be in the way if I ran down?

C. I should think a visit from you would be an immense pleasure to him; and I am sure it would be good for the place to be stirred up.

PROF.  D. You have not learnt to prize that atmosphere in which things always seem to assume their true proportion, and to prompt the cry of St. Bernard’s brother—­’All earth for me, all heaven for you.’

C. That was surely an outcome of the time when people used to sacrifice certainties to uncertainties, and spoil life for the sake of they knew not what.

PROF.  D. For eye hath not seen, nor ear heard.

STRANGER.  Mr. Dunlop!  This is an unexpected pleasure!

C. (ALONE).  Well, wonders will never cease.  The great Professor Dunlop talking to me quite preachy and goody; and of all people in the world, the old man at Darkglade turning out to be a great physiologist!

VII.  TWO OLD FRIENDS

SCENE.—­DARKGLADE VICARAGE STUDY.  MR. AVELAND AND PROFESSOR DUNLOP.

PROF.  D. Thank you, sir.  It has been a great pleasure to talk over these matters with you; I hope a great benefit.

MR. A. I am sure it is a great benefit to us to have a breath from the outer world.  I hope you will never let so long a time go by without our meeting.  Remember, as iron sharpeneth iron, so doth a man’s countenance that of his friend.