ne,
is to pass a judgment on the doings of a poor, hunted dog, slavishly
afraid, slavishly rebellious, like John Nicholson on that particular
Sunday? His hand was in the drawer almost before his mind had conceived
the hope; and rising to his new situation, he wrote, sitting in his
father's chair and using his father's blotting-pad, his pitiful apology
and farewell--

"MY DEAR FATHER,--I have taken the money, but I will pay it back as
soon as I am able. You will never hear of me again. I did not mean any
harm by anything, so I hope you will try and forgive me. I wish you
would say good-bye for me to Alexander and Maria, but not if you don't
want to. I could not wait to see you, really. Please try to forgive
me."

"Your affectionate son, JOHN NICHOLSON."

The coins abstracted and the missive written, he could not be gone too
soon from the scene of these transgressions; and remembering how his
father had once returned from church, on some slight illness, in the
middle of the second psalm, he durst not even make a packet of a change
of clothes. Attired as he was, he slipped from the paternal doors, and
found himself in the cool spring air, the thin spring sunshine, and the
great Sabbath quiet of the city, which was now only pointed by the
cawing of the rooks. There was not a soul in Randolph Crescent, nor a
soul in Queensferry Street; in this outdoor privacy and the sense of
escape, John took heart again; and with a pathetic sense of
leave-taking, he even ventured up the lane and stood a while, a strange
peri at the gates of a quaint paradise, by the west end of St. George's
Church. They were singing within; and by a strange chance the tune was
"St. George's, Edinburgh," which bears the name, and was first sung in
the choir, of that church. "Who is this King of Glory?" went the voices
from within; and to John this was like the end of all Christian
observances, for he was now to be a wild man like Ishmael, and his life
was to be cast in homeless places and with godless people.

It was thus, with no rising sense of the adventurous, but in mere
desolation and despair, that he turned his back on his native city, and
set out on foot for California--with a more immediate eye to Glasgow.

CHAPTER IV

THE SECOND SOWING

It is no part of mine to narrate the adventures of John Nicholson, which
were many, but simply his more momentous misadventures, which were more
than he desired, and by human st