s," and he must stay
there, inactive, but publicly sharing the responsibility. "You are a
gentleman--you will protect me!" cried the wounded old man, crawling
towards him. "I will never lay a hand on you," said Hackston, and put
his cloak about his mouth. It is an old temptation with me to pluck away
that cloak and see the face--to open that bosom and to read the heart.
With incomplete romances about Hackston, the drawers of my youth were
lumbered. I read him up in every printed book that I could lay my hands
on. I even dug among the Wodrow manuscripts, sitting shame-faced in the
very room where my hero had been tortured two centuries before, and
keenly conscious of my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly
thought) more gifted students. All was vain: that he had passed a
riotous nonage, that he was a zealot, that he twice displayed (compared
with his grotesque companions) some tincture of soldierly resolution and
even of military common sense, and that he figured memorably in the
scene on Magus Muir, so much and no more could I make out. But whenever
I cast my eyes backward, it is to see him like a landmark on the plains
of history, sitting with his cloak about his mouth, inscrutable. How
small a thing creates an immortality! I do not think he can have been a
man entirely commonplace; but had he not thrown his cloak about his
mouth, or had the witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he would not
thus have haunted the imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would
scarce delay me for a paragraph. An incident, at once romantic and
dramatic, which at once awakes the judgment and makes a picture for the
eye, how little do we realise its perdurable power! Perhaps no one does
so but the author, just as none but he appreciates the influence of
jingling words; so that he looks on upon life, with something of a
covert smile, seeing people led by what they fancy to be thoughts and
what are really the accustomed artifices of his own trade, or roused by
what they take to be principles and are really picturesque effects. In a
pleasant book about a school-class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently
told a little anecdote. A "Philosophical Society" was formed by some
Academy boys--among them, Colonel Fergusson himself, Fleeming Jenkin,
and Andrew Wilson, the Christian Buddhist and author of "The Abode of
Snow." Before these learned pundits, one member laid the following
ingenious problem: "What would be the result of putting a p