y came upon him he was studying his sermon--I do not
mean the truths he intended to press upon his audience--those he had
mastered long ago--but his manuscript, studying it in the sense in
which actors use the word, learning it, that is, by heart
laboriously, that the words might come from his lips as much like an
extemporaneous utterance as possible, consistently with not being
mistaken for one, which, were it true as the Bible, would have no
merit in the ears of those who counted themselves judges of the
craft. The kind of thing suited Fergus, whose highest idea of life
was seeming. Naturally capable, he had already made of himself
rather a dull fellow; for when a man spends his energy on appearing
to have, he is all the time destroying what he has, and therein the
very means of becoming what he desires to seem. If he gains his end
his success is his punishment.

Fergus never forgot that he was a clergyman, always carrying himself
according to his idea of the calling; therefore when the interchange
of commonplaces flagged, he began to look about him for some remark
sufficiently tinged with his profession to be suitable for him to
make, and for the ladies to hear as his. The wind was a thoroughly
wintry one from the north-east, and had been blowing all night, so
that the waves were shouldering the rocks with huge assault. Now
Fergus's sermon, which he meant to use as a spade for the casting of
the first turf of the first parallel in the siege of the pulpit of
the North parish, was upon the vanity of human ambition, his text
being the grand verse--And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come
and gone from the place of the holy; there was no small amount of
fine writing in the manuscript he had thrust into his pocket; and
his sermon was in his head when he remarked, with the wafture of a
neatly-gloved hand seawards--

"I was watching these waves when you found me: they seem to me such
a picture of the vanity of human endeavour! But just as little as
those waves would mind me, if I told them they were wasting their
labour on these rocks, will men mind me, when I tell them to-morrow
of the emptiness of their ambitions."

"A present enstance o' the vainity o' human endeevour!" said Donal.
"What for sud ye, in that case, gang on preachin', sae settin' them
an ill exemple?"

Duff gave him a high-lidded glance, vouchsafing no reply.

"Just as those waves," he continued, "waste themselves in effort, as
often foil