s of
sticking-plaster on his cheek.

CHAPTER II

FURTH! FORTUNE!

In this plain story of mine there will be so many wild doings ere the
end is reached, that I beg my reader's assent to a prosaic digression.
I will tell briefly the things which happened between my sight of the
man on the Kirkcaple sands and my voyage to Africa. I continued for
three years at the burgh school, where my progress was less notable in
my studies than in my sports. One by one I saw my companions pass out
of idle boyhood and be set to professions. Tam Dyke on two occasions
ran off to sea in the Dutch schooners which used to load with coal in
our port; and finally his father gave him his will, and he was
apprenticed to the merchant service. Archie Leslie, who was a year my
elder, was destined for the law, so he left Kirkcaple for an Edinburgh
office, where he was also to take out classes at the college. I
remained on at school till I sat alone by myself in the highest
class--a position of little dignity and deep loneliness. I had grown a
tall, square-set lad, and my prowess at Rugby football was renowned
beyond the parishes of Kirkcaple and Portincross. To my father I fear
I was a disappointment. He had hoped for something in his son more
bookish and sedentary, more like his gentle, studious self.

On one thing I was determined: I should follow a learned profession.
The fear of being sent to an office, like so many of my schoolfellows,
inspired me to the little progress I ever made in my studies. I chose
the ministry, not, I fear, out of any reverence for the sacred calling,
but because my father had followed it before me. Accordingly I was
sent at the age of sixteen for a year's finishing at the High School of
Edinburgh, and the following winter began my Arts course at the
university.

If Fate had been kinder to me, I think I might have become a scholar.
At any rate I was just acquiring a taste for philosophy and the dead
languages when my father died suddenly of a paralytic shock, and I had
to set about earning a living.

My mother was left badly off, for my poor father had never been able to
save much from his modest stipend. When all things were settled, it
turned out that she might reckon on an income of about fifty pounds a
year. This was not enough to live on, however modest the household,
and certainly not enough to pay for the colleging of a son. At this
point an uncle of hers stepped forward with a proposal. He