ason, cold and everything else but what he was thinking about--a
faculty for which he was to be envied.

If he had gone down the stair, which described half the turn of a screw
in its descent, and had crossed the landing to which it brought him,
he could have entered another bedroom, called the gable or rather ga'le
room, equally at his service for retirement; but, though carpeted
and comfortably furnished, and having two windows at right angles,
commanding two streets, for it was a corner house, the boy preferred
the garret-room--he could not tell why. Possibly, windows to the streets
were not congenial to the meditations in which, even now, as I have
said, the boy indulged.

These meditations, however, though sometimes as abstruse, if not so
continuous, as those of a metaphysician--for boys are not unfrequently
more given to metaphysics than older people are able or, perhaps,
willing to believe--were not by any means confined to such subjects:
castle-building had its full share in the occupation of those lonely
hours; and for this exercise of the constructive faculty, what he
knew, or rather what he did not know, of his own history gave him
scope enough, nor was his brain slow in supplying him with material
corresponding in quantity to the space afforded. His mother had been
dead for so many years that he had only the vaguest recollections of her
tenderness, and none of her person. All he was told of his father was
that he had gone abroad. His grandmother would never talk about him,
although he was her own son. When the boy ventured to ask a question
about where he was, or when he would return, she always replied--'Bairns
suld haud their tongues.' Nor would she vouchsafe another answer to any
question that seemed to her from the farthest distance to bear down upon
that subject. 'Bairns maun learn to haud their tongues,' was the sole
variation of which the response admitted. And the boy did learn to hold
his tongue. Perhaps he would have thought less about his father if he
had had brothers or sisters, or even if the nature of his grandmother
had been such as to admit of their relationship being drawn closer--into
personal confidence, or some measure of familiarity. How they stood with
regard to each other will soon appear.

Whether the visions vanished from his brain because of the thickening of
his blood with cold, or he merely acted from one of those undefined and
inexplicable impulses which occasion not a few of o