iven him a world where he could shape his
career according to his whimsical fancy. Not that Mr. McCunn was what
is known as a great reader. He read slowly and fastidiously, and sought
in literature for one thing alone. Sir Walter Scott had been his first
guide, but he read the novels not for their insight into human
character or for their historical pageantry, but because they gave him
material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys. It was the same
with Dickens. A lit tavern, a stage-coach, post-horses, the clack of
hoofs on a frosty road, went to his head like wine. He was a Jacobite
not because he had any views on Divine Right, but because he had always
before his eyes a picture of a knot of adventurers in cloaks, new
landed from France among the western heather.

On this select basis he had built up his small library--Defoe, Hakluyt,
Hazlitt and the essayists, Boswell, some indifferent romances, and a
shelf of spirited poetry. His tastes became known, and he acquired a
reputation for a scholarly habit. He was president of the Literary
Society of the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, and read to its members a variety
of papers full of a gusto which rarely became critical. He had been
three times chairman at Burns Anniversary dinners, and had delivered
orations in eulogy of the national Bard; not because he greatly admired
him--he thought him rather vulgar--but because he took Burns as an
emblem of the un-Burns-like literature which he loved. Mr. McCunn was
no scholar and was sublimely unconscious of background. He grew his
flowers in his small garden-plot oblivious of their origin so long as
they gave him the colour and scent he sought. Scent, I say, for he
appreciated more than the mere picturesque. He had a passion for words
and cadences, and would be haunted for weeks by a cunning phrase,
savouring it as a connoisseur savours a vintage. Wherefore long ago,
when he could ill afford it, he had purchased the Edinburgh Stevenson.
They were the only large books on his shelves, for he had a liking for
small volumes--things he could stuff into his pocket in that sudden
journey which he loved to contemplate.

Only he had never taken it. The shop had tied him up for eleven months
in the year, and the twelfth had always found him settled decorously
with his wife in some seaside villa. He had not fretted, for he was
content with dreams. He was always a little tired, too, when the
holidays came, and his wife told him he