care,
began to brisk up at once, and was quite certain of recovery when one
afternoon they left Muirtown Station. Some dozen boys were there to see
them off, and it was Jock and Speug who helped Moossy to place
her comfortably in the carriage. The gang had pooled their
pocket-money--selling one or two treasures to swell the sum--that Moossy
and his wife might go away laden with such dainties as schoolboys love,
and Nestie had a bunch of flowers to place in her hands. They still
called him Moossy, as they had done before, and he looked, to tell the
truth, almost as shabby and his hair was as long as ever; but he was in
great spirits and much touched by the kindness of his tormentors. As the
English mail pulled out of Muirtown Station with quickening speed, the
boys ran along the platform beside the carriage shaking hands with
Moossy through the open window and passing in their gifts.

"Take care o' mices!" shouted Jock, with agreeable humour, but the last
sight Moossy had of Muirtown was Speug standing on a luggage-barrow and
waving farewell.

A LAST RESOURCE

X

That the Rector should be ill and absent from his classes from time to
time was quite in the order of things, because he was a scholar and
absent-minded to a degree--going to bed in the morning, and being got
out of bed in rather less than time for his work; eating when it
occurred to him, but preferring, on the whole, not to eat at all;
wearing very much the same clothes summer and winter, and if he added a
heavy top-coat, more likely putting it on in the height of summer and
going without it when there were ten degrees of frost. It was not for
his scholarship, but for his peculiarities, that the school loved him;
not because he edited a "Caesar" and compiled a set of Latin exercises,
for which perfectly unnecessary and disgusting labours the school hated
him, but because he used to arrive at ten minutes past nine, and his
form was able to jeer at Bulldog's boys as they hastened into their
class-room with much discretion at one minute before the hour. Because
he used to be so much taken up with a happy phrase in Horace that he
would forget the presence of his class, and walk up and down before the
fireplace, chortling aloud; and because sometimes he was so hoarse that
he could only communicate with the class by signs, which they
unanimously misunderstood. Because he would sometimes be absent for a
whole week, and his form was thrown in with anothe