spring, but it is not
asked for now at all." And in proof that the volume she recommended
was quite genteel, she would add: "That one was up at the Castle last
Saturday. Lady Charlotte's maid, you will notice, wet all the pages
crying over the places where the lover went to sea another voyage. It
is a very clever book, my dear, and I think there is a moral, I do not
remember what the moral is, but I know there is one or else I would not
recommend it. It is in large black type you see, and there is a great
deal of speaking in parlours in it, which is always informing and nice
in a book."

"You have none of Mr. Scott's poetry?" asked Gilian one day, moved
thereto by an extract read by Brooks to his scholars.

"Scott, Scott," said Miss Marget. "Now let me think, my dear."

She turned her odd thin figure and her borrowed curls bobbed behind her
ears as she tilted up her head and glanced along the shelves for what
she knew was not there.

"No, my boy," she said. "We have none of Mr. Scott's works at present.
There is a demand among some people for Mr. Scott I believe, but," here
she frowned slightly, "I do not think you are old enough for poetry.
It is too romantic, and--it lingers in the memory. I have not read him
myself though I hear he is clever--in a way. I would not say that I
object to Mr. Scott, but I do not recommend him to my young customers."

So off Gilian would go with his book under his arm to the Ramparts. The
Ramparts were about the old Tolbooth and kept crime within and the sea
without. Up would the tide come in certain weathers thrashing on the
granite cubes, beating as it might be for freedom to the misunderstood
within, beating and hissing and falling back and dashing in again and
streaming out between the joints of masonry in briny jets. Half-way up
the Ramparts was a foot-wide ledge, and here the boy would walk round
the bastions and in the square face to the sea would sit upon the ledge
with his legs dangling over the water and read his volume. It might be
the "Mysteries of Udolpho," "Thaddeus of Warsaw," "Moll Flanders," or
"Belinda," the story of one Random, a wandering vagabond, or Crusoe, but
no matter where the story led, the boy whose feet dangled over the sea
was there. And long though the tale might be Gilian pieced it out in
fancy by many pages. His situation on the Ramparts was an aid to his
imagination, for as he sat there the sea would be sluggishly rolling
below or beating in petulan