for Donal, Fergus went back to college. Donal went on
herding the cattle, cudgeling Hornie, and reading what books he
could lay his hands on: there was no supply through Fergus any more,
alas! The year before, ere he took his leave, he had been careful
to see Donal provided with at least books for study; but this time
he left him to shift for himself. He was small because he was
proud, spiteful because he was conceited. He would let Donal know
what it was to have lost his favour! But Donal did not suffer much,
except in the loss of the friendship itself. He managed to get the
loan of a copy of Burns--better meat for a strong spirit than the
poetry of Byron or even Scott. An innate cleanliness of soul
rendered the occasional coarseness to him harmless, and the mighty
torrent of the man's life, broken by occasional pools reflecting the
stars; its headlong hatred of hypocrisy and false religion; its
generosity, and struggling conscientiousness; its failures and its
repentances, roused much in the heart of Donal. Happily the copy he
had borrowed, had in it a tolerable biography; and that, read along
with the man's work, enabled him, young as he was, to see something
of where and how he had failed, and to shadow out to himself, not
altogether vaguely, the perils to which the greatest must be exposed
who cannot rule his own spirit, but, like a mere child, reels from
one mood into another--at the will of--what?

From reading Burns, Donal learned also not a little of the
capabilities of his own language; for, Celt as he was by birth and
country and mental character, he could not speak the Gaelic: that
language, soft as the speech of streams from rugged mountains, and
wild as that of the wind in the tops of fir-trees, the language at
once of bards and fighting men, had so far ebbed from the region,
lingering only here and there in the hollow pools of old memories,
that Donal had never learned it; and the lowland Scotch, an ancient
branch of English, dry and gnarled, but still flourishing in its old
age, had become instead, his mother-tongue; and the man who loves
the antique speech, or even the mere patois, of his childhood, and
knows how to use it, possesses therein a certain kind of power over
the hearts of men, which the most refined and perfect of languages
cannot give, inasmuch as it has travelled farther from the original
sources of laughter and tears. But the old Scotish itself is, alas!
rapidly vanishing bef