of October. He was a human kind of soul
notwithstanding, and would have been much more of a man if he had
thought less of being a gentleman. He had taken a liking to Donal,
and having found in him a strong desire after every kind of
knowledge of which he himself had any share, had sought to enliven
the tedium of an existence rendered not a little flabby from want of
sufficient work, by imparting to him of the treasures he had
gathered. They were not great, and he could never have carried him
far, for he was himself only a respectable student, not a little
lacking in perseverance, and given to dreaming dreams of which he
was himself the hero. Happily, however, Donal was of another sort,
and from the first needed but to have the outermost shell of a thing
broken for him, and that Fergus could do: by and by Donal would
break a shell for himself.

But perhaps the best thing Fergus did for him was the lending him
books. Donal had an altogether unappeasable hunger after every form
of literature with which he had as yet made acquaintance, and this
hunger Fergus fed with the books of the house, and many besides of
such as he purchased or borrowed for his own reading--these last
chiefly poetry. But Fergus Duff, while he revelled in the writings
of certain of the poets of the age, was incapable of finding poetry
for himself in the things around him: Donal Grant, on the other
hand, while he seized on the poems Fergus lent him, with an avidity
even greater than his, received from the nature around him
influences similar to those which exhaled from the words of the
poet. In some sense, then, Donal was original; that is, he received
at first hand what Fergus required to have "put on" him, to quote
Celia, in As you like it, "as pigeons feed their young." Therefore,
fiercely as it would have harrowed the pride of Fergus to be
informed of the fact, he was in the kingdom of art only as one who
ate of what fell from the table, while his father's herd-boy was one
of the family. This was as far from Donal's thought, however, as
from that of Fergus; the condescension, therefore, of the latter did
not impair the gratitude for which the former had such large reason;
and Donal looked up to Fergus as to one of the lords of the world.

To find himself now in the reversed relation of superior and teacher
to the little outcast, whose whole worldly having might be summed in
the statement that he was not absolutely naked, woke in Donal a