brothers and sisters you do
not know!" said Donal.

"My mother told me," she rejoined, "of a man who had had so many wives
and children that his son, whom she had met, positively did not know
all his brothers and sisters."

"I suspect," said Donal, "we have to know our brothers and sisters."

"I do not understand."

"We have even got to feel a man is our brother the moment we see him,"
pursued Donal, enhancing his former remark.

"That sounds alarming!" said Miss Graeme, with another laugh. "My
little heart feels not large enough to receive so many."

"The worst of it is," continued Donal, who once started was not ready
to draw rein, "that those who chiefly advocate this extension of the
family bonds, begin by loving their own immediate relations less than
anybody else. Extension with them means slackening--as if any one
could learn to love more by loving less, or go on to do better without
doing well! He who loves his own little will not love others much."

"But how can we love those who are nothing to us?" objected Miss Graeme.

"That would be impossible. The family relations are for the sake of
developing a love rooted in a far deeper though less recognized
relation.--But I beg your pardon, Miss Graeme. Little Davie alone is
my pupil, and I forget myself."

"I am very glad to listen to you," returned Miss Graeme. "I cannot say
I am prepared to agree with you. But it is something, in this
out-of-the-way corner, to hear talk from which it is even worth while
to differ."

"Ah, you can have that here if you will!"

"Indeed!"

"I mean talk from which you would probably differ. There is an old man
in the town who can talk better than ever I heard man before. But he is
a poor man, with a despised handicraft, and none heed him. No
community recognizes its great men till they are gone."

"Where is the use then of being great?" said Miss Graeme.

"To be great," answered Donal, "--to which the desire to be known of
men is altogether destructive. To be great is to seem little in the
eyes of men."

Miss Graeme did not answer. She was not accustomed to consider things
seriously. A good girl in a certain true sense, she had never yet seen
that she had to be better, or indeed to be anything. But she was able
to feel, though she was far from understanding him, that Donal was in
earnest, and that was much. To recognize that a man means something,
is a great step towards understanding him.

"What a love