in the class whenever the students could remember it.  There was great work done in that class-room—­in the manufacture of paper darts.  Ebenezer took no part in such frivolities, but laboured at the acquisition of such Greek as a future student of theology would most require.  And he succeeded so well that, on leaving, the Professor complimented him in the following terms, which were thought at the time to be handsome:  “Ye don’t know much Greek, but ye know more than most of your kind—­that is, ye can find a Greek word in the dictionary.”  It was evident from this that Ebenezer was a favourite pupil, but some said that it was because Lauchland was pleased with the pun he made on the name Skinner.  There are always envious persons about to explain away success.

Socially, Ebenezer confined himself to the winding stairs of the University, and the bleak South-side streets and closes, through which blew wafts of perfume that were not of Arcady.  Once he went out to supper, but suffered so much from being asked to carve a chicken that he resolved never to go again.  He talked chiefly to the youth next to him on Bench Seventeen, who had come from another rural village, and who lived in a garret exactly like his own in Nicolson Square.

Sometimes the two of them walked through the streets to the General Post Office and back again on Saturday nights to post their letters home, and talked all the while of their landladies and of the number of marks each had got on Friday in the Latin version.  Thus they improved their minds and received the benefits of a college education.

At the end of the session Ebenezer went back directly to his village on the very day the classes closed and he could get no more for his money; where, on the strength of a year at the college, he posed as the learned man of the neighbourhood.  He did not study much at home but what he did was done with abundant pomp and circumstance.  His mother used to take in awed visitors to the “room,” cautioning them that they must not disturb any of Ebenezer’s “Greek and Laitin” books, lest in this way the career of her darling might be instantly blighted.  Privately she used to go in by herself and pore over the unknown wonders of Ebenezer’s Greek prose versions, with an admiration which the class-assistant in Edinburgh had never been able to feel for them.

Such was the career of Ebenezer Skinner for four years.  He oscillated between the dinginess and dulness of the capital as he knew it, and the well-accustomed rurality of his home.  For him the historic associations of Edinburgh were as good as naught.  He and Sandy Kerr (Bench Seventeen) heard the bugles blaring at ten o’clock from the Castle on windy Saturday nights, as they walked up the Bridges, and never stirred a pulse!  They never went into Holyrood, because some one told Ebenezer that there was a shilling to pay.  He did not know what a quiet place it was to walk and read in on wet Saturdays, when there is nothing whatever to pay.  He read no books, confining himself to his class-books and the local paper, which his mother laboriously addressed and sent to him weekly.  Occasionally he began to read a volume which one of his more literary companions had acquired on the recommendation of one of the professors, but he rarely got beyond the first twenty pages.