t all, but for the far finer and more
wholesome rarity called peace. Captain, Captain!" (and here would he
grasp the Paymaster by the coat lapels with the friendly freedom of an
old acquaintance,) "Captain, Captain! it is not a world for war though
we are the fools to be fancying so, but a world for good-fellowship, so
short the period we have of it, so wonderful the mind of them about us,
so kind with all their faults! I find more of the natural human in the
back room of Kate's there where the merchants discourse upon their bales
and accounts than I would among your half-pay gentry who would have the
country knee-deep in blood every day in the calendar if they had their
way of it."

"It's aye the old story with you," the Paymaster would say tolerantly.
"You cannot see that if this country has not its wars and rumours of
wars, its marchings-off and weedings-out, it would die of a rot. I hope
you are not putting too many notions of that clerkly kind in the boy's
head. Eh? I would be vexed to have my plans for him spoiled and a
possible good soldier turned into a swindling writer."

"The boy's made, Captain Campbell," said the schoolmaster one day at
this. "He was made and his end appointed ere ever he came to your house
or felt my ferule-end. He is of the dream nature and he will be what
he will be. I can no more fashion him to the common standard than I can
make the fir-tree like unto the juniper. I've had many a curious student
yonder, wild and tame, dunce and genius, but this one baffles me. He was
a while up in the glen school, they tell me, and he learned there such
rudiments as he has, but what he knows best was never learned anywhere
but as the tinkler learns--by the roadside and in the wood."

"I know he's a droll one," said the Paymaster, uneasily, with a
thoughtful brow, "but you have the reputation, Mr. Brooks, you have
turned out lads who were a credit to you. If it is not in him, thwack it
in with your tawse."

The Dominie flushed a little. He never cared to have the tawse
mentioned; it was an ally he felt ashamed of in his fight with ignorance
and he used it rarely, though custom and the natural perverse-ness of
youth made its presence necessary in his desk.

"Captain Campbell," said he, "it is not the tawse that ever put wisdom
into a head like yon. The boy is unco, the boy is a _lusus naturo_, that
is all; as sharp as a needle when his interest is aroused, as absent as
an idiot when it is not, and th