f, "It is impossible that he
can have remembered and assimilated all that we went over yesterday!"
But once the breakfast-things cleared away, he found Stair as sharp-set
as a terrier at a rat-hole, as it were, nosing after knowledge. Nothing
seemed to come wrong to him, and if he did not understand anything, an
apt question set him right, and when Stair flung up his head, his eye
misty and his intelligence withdrawn, Julian Wemyss stopped also,
because he understood.

"He is filing that away where he can find it," he thought to himself.
And far into the night he could see reflected on the roof a faint
glimmer from Stair's dark-lantern. His curiosity was aroused, and he
looked into the gloomy kitchen with the heaped peats filling all the
space even to the roof. There, with his feet to the smouldering fire of
red ashes, lay Stair Garland, his notebooks in front of him and a volume
propped against an upturned pot, threshing his way pioneer-wise through
the work of the next day. Julian Wemyss went softly back to bed, but did
not sleep for a long while.

"If that fellow fights for the Emperor," he said to himself, "he will do
it with his head. Yet they call him the 'fechtin' fool' in these parts.
The boy has never had a chance, that is all. His ambition and facility
have given him the leading-place among these smugglers and defiers of
the press-gang, because no other career opened itself to him. We shall
see when the _Good Intent_ comes in the spring. In the meanwhile, never
tutor had such a pupil!"

Yet more marvellous were the weeks as they went past for Stair Garland.
Every morning he woke fresh to the romantic adventure of books. His eyes
flashed down marvellous pages, taking in their gist, and then he settled
himself with a happy sigh to analyze line upon line, to warehouse
precept upon precept.

Yet he did not leave any of his outside duties unattended to. He knew of
every change made in the garrison at Stranryan. Fergus and Agnew came
nightly to the verge of the Wild. He met with Jean at the alder copse.
His father talked with him standing upon Peden's Stone, and (as he said)
"tairged him tightly" for his occasional neglect in reading the Bible,
which was the root of all things of good report in this world as well as
in the next.

To which Julian Wemyss added that it was also the foundation of good
manners and good style. For all which reasons and also because of the
reverence natural to his people, Stair Garla