man prospers. Several years of honourable and self-
restraining love bring him a wife, beautiful, loving, worshipping his
talents; a help meet for him, such as God will send at times to those
whom he loves. Kind men meet and love and help him--"The Johnstones,
Mr. Tait, William and Mary Howitt;" Sir William Molesworth, hearing
of his last illness, sends him unsolicited fifty pounds, which, as we
understand it, Nicoll accepts without foolish bluster about
independence. Why not?--man should help man, and be helped by him.
Would he not have done as much for Sir William? Nothing to us proves
Nicoll's heart-wholeness more than the way in which he talks of his
benefactors, in a tone of simple gratitude and affection, without
fawning and without vapouring. The man has too much self-respect to
consider himself lowered by accepting a favour.

But he must go after all. The editor's den at Leeds is not the place
for lungs bred on Perthshire breezes; and work rises before him,
huger and heavier as he goes on, till he drops under the ever-
increasing load. He will not believe it at first. In sweet
childlike playful letters, he tells his mother that it is nothing.
It has done him good--"opened the grave before his eyes, and taught
him to think of death." "He trusts that he has not borne this, and
suffered, and thought in vain." This too, he hopes, is to be a fresh
lesson-page of experience for his work. Alas! a few months more of
bitter suffering, and of generous kindness and love from all around
him--and it is over with him at the age of twenty-three. Shall we
regret him?--shall we not rather believe that God knew best; and
considering the unhealthy moral atmosphere of the second-class press,
and the strange confused ways into which old ultra-Radicalism,
finding itself too narrow for the new problems of the day, has
stumbled and floundered during the last fifteen years, believe that
he might have been a worse man had he been a longer-lived one, and
thank heaven that "the righteous is taken away from the evil to
come?"

As it is, he ends as he began. The first poem in his book is "The
Ha' Bible;" and the last, written a few days before his death, is
still the death-song of a man--without fear, without repining,
without boasting, blessing and loving the earth which he leaves, yet
with a clear joyful eye upwards and outwards and homewards. And so
ends his little epic, as we called it. May Scotland see many such
anoth