burn;
and, as ever, in those days, it lamented and cursed and bitterly
complained.

Why, why was I pursued by a malady of incompetence that clung to both
mind and body? (So ran my thoughts.) Why was I bruised and beaten by
Providence? Why had I been given a soul that could not express itself in
the frame of a coward, a weakling, a thin, nervous, dwarfish, almost a
deformed, creature? If my soul had corresponded exactly to my body, then
all might have been well enough. I should have been more complete,
although less, in some way, than I now was. For such a soul would have
accepted cowardice, weakness, inferiority to others as suitable to it,
as a right fate. Such a soul would never have known the meaning of the
word rebellion, would never have been able to understand its own cancer
of disease, to diagnose the symptoms of its villainous and creeping
malady. It would never have aspired like a flame, and longed in vain to
burn clearly and grandly or to flicker out for ever. Rather would such a
soul have guttered on like some cheap and ill-smelling candle, shedding
shadows rather than any light, ignorant of its own obscurity, regardless
of the possibilities that teem like waking children in the wondrous womb
of life, oblivious of the contempt of the souls around it, heedless of
ambition, of the trumpet call of success, of the lust to be something,
to do something, of the magic, of the stinging magic of achievement.
With such a soul in my hateful, pinched, meagre, pallid body--I thought,
sitting thus by the burn--I might have been content, an utterly low, and
perhaps an utterly satisfied product of the fiend creation.

But my soul was not of this kind, and so I was the most bitterly
miserable of men. God--or the Devil--had made me ill-shaped, physically
despicable, with the malign sort of countenance that so often
accompanies and illustrates a bad poor body. My limbs, without being
actually twisted, were shrunken and incompetent--they would not obey my
desires as do the limbs of other men. My legs would not grip a horse.
When I rode I was a laughing-stock. My arms had no swiftness, no
agility, no delicate and subtle certainty. When I tried to box, to
fence, I was one whirling, jigging incapacity. I had feeble sight, and
objects presented themselves to my vision so strangely that I could not
shoot straight. I, Alistair Ralston the young Laird of Carlounie! When I
walked my limbs moved heavily and awkwardly. I had no grace, no