Corp would have replied admiringly to this “Oh, the little deevil!” (when he heard of Tommy’s failure he wanted to fight Gav Dishart and Willie Simpson), but Aaron was another kind of confidant, and even when she explained on Tommy’s authority that there are two kinds of cleverness, the kind you learn from books and a kind that is inside yourself, which latter was Tommy’s kind, he only replied,

“He can take it wi’ him to the herding, then, and see if it’ll keep the cattle frae stravaiging.”

“It’s no that kind of cleverness either,” said Elspeth, quaking, and quaked also Tommy, who had gone to the garret, to listen through the floor.

“No?  I would like to ken what use his cleverness can be put to, then,” said Aaron, and Elspeth answered nothing, and Tommy only sighed, for that indeed was the problem.  But though to these three and to Cathro, and to Mr. and Mrs. McLean and to others more mildly interested, it seemed a problem beyond solution, there was one in Thrums who rocked her arms at their denseness, a girl growing so long in the legs that twice within the last year she had found it necessary to let down her parramatty frock.  As soon as she heard that Tommy had come home vanquished, she put on the quaint blue bonnet with the white strings, in which she fondly believed she looked ever so old (her period of mourning was at an end, but she still wore her black dress) and forgetting all except that he was unhappy, she ran to a certain little house to comfort him.  But she did not go in, for through the window she saw Elspeth petting him, and that somehow annoyed her.  In the evening, however, she called on Mr. Cathro.

Perhaps you want to know why she, who at last saw Sentimental Tommy in his true light and spurned him accordingly, now exerted herself in his behalf instead of going on with the papering of the surgery.  Well, that was the reason.  She had put the question to herself before—­not, indeed, before going to Monypenny but before calling on the Dominie—­and decided that she wanted to send Tommy to college, because she disliked him so much that she could not endure the prospect of his remaining in Thrums.  Now, are you satisfied?

She could scarcely take time to say good-evening to Mr. Cathro before telling him the object of her visit.  “The letters Tommy has been writing for people are very clever, are they not?” she began.

“You’ve heard of them, have you?”

“Everybody has heard of them,” she said injudiciously, and he groaned and asked if she had come to tell him this.  But he admitted their cleverness, whereupon she asked, “Well, if he is clever at writing letters, would he not be clever at writing an essay?”

“I wager my head against a snuff mull that he would be, but what are you driving at?”

“I was wondering whether he could not win the prize I heard Dr. McQueen speaking about, the—­is it not called the Hugh Blackadder?”