, had his aim been high enough, have saved his soul from death,
and turned the charnel of his life into a temple. Abject as he is,
foiled and despised, such a one may not yet be half so contemptible
as many a so-counted respectable member of society, who looks down
on him from a height too lofty even for scorn. It is not the first
and the last only, of whom many will have to change places; but
those as well that come everywhere between.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PARLOUR.

The day went on, and went out, its short autumnal brightness
quenched in a chilly fog. All along the Widdiehill, the gas was
alight in the low-browed dingy shops. To the well-to-do citizen
hastening home to the topmost business of the day, his dinner, these
looked the abodes of unlovely poverty and mean struggle. Even to
those behind their counters, in their back parlours, and in their
rooms above, everything about them looked common, to most of them,
save the owners, wearisome. But to yon pale-faced student, gliding
in the glow of his red gown, through the grey mist back to his
lodging, and peeping in at every open door as he passes, they are so
full of mystery, that gladly would he yield all he has gathered from
books, for one genuine glance of insight into the vital movement of
the hearts and households of which those open shops are the sole
outward and visible signs. Each house is to him a nest of human
birds, over which brood the eternal wings of love and purpose. Only
such different birds are hatched from the same nest! And what a
nest was then the city itself!--with its university, its schools,
its churches, its hospitals, its missions; its homes, its
lodging-houses, its hotels, its drinking shops, its houses viler
still; its factories, its ships, its great steamers; and the same
humanity busy in all!--here the sickly lady walking in the panoply
of love unharmed through the horrors of vicious suffering; there the
strong mother cursing her own child along half a street with an
intensity and vileness of execration unheard elsewhere! The will of
the brooding spirit must be a grand one, indeed, to enclose so much
of what cannot be its will, and turn all to its purpose of eternal
good! Our knowledge of humanity, how much more our knowledge of the
Father of it, is moving as yet but in the first elements.

In his shed under the stair it had been dark for some time--too dark
for work, that is, and George Galbraith had lighted a candle: he