“That is just what I mean to do.”
“And may be the Lord will raise you up a frien’.”
“Who can tell?”
Sandie was silent for a while. Then he raised himself up till his glance could meet that of his mother.
“O mother, dear,” he said gleefully, “won’t it be nice when I’m a minister, and when I get a call! It must be to some bonnie country parish, mother. I couldn’t stand the noisy town. I must hear the wild birds sing, see the wild flowers bloom, and listen to the winds sighing through the pine-trees. I must be near a stream where on bonnie summer evenings I can fish and read. My manse must be a bonnie one, too, surrounded by trees and fine old-fashioned gardens. Mother, I already can hear the church-bell ringing on the Sabbath morn, and I can see you and father—for, of course, you both will live with me—coming arm in arm through the auld kirkyard to the church-door, and slowly up the passage to your pew beneath the pulpit stairs. Oh, it will be a happy life! But now, mother, I’m off to my study, to struggle another hour or two with Virgil. I’ll be in again in time for supper. Ta-ta, mother.”
And off strode Sandie, and his mother resumed her knitting, the tear, however, still glancing in her eye.
CHAPTER III
THE PLOUGHMAN-STUDENT AT HOME
Sandie M‘Craw’s study was unique in its way. To get to it he had to enter the stable first, then scramble up a straight ladder fastened against the wall, and so through a trap-door. This landed him in a large granary and straw loft. There was a window at the far end, and around this window Sandie, with his own hands, had boarded off a portion about ten feet square. Here were a table, a chair, and some rough book-shelves, and this was Sandie’s study.
It was comfortable enough in summer nights, but when in winter the window was banked high with snow, when the winds howled wild and drear without, and the temperature had sunk almost to zero, then study in such a room was something of a hardship.
But although night was really the only time Sandie had for study, he never gave in. And in the darkest, dreariest nights of winter you might have found him here, his bonnet pulled down over his ears, a Scottish plaid rolled round his chest, and a horse-rug over his knees, deep in the learned intricacies of Juvenal, Horace, Homer, or Livy, or translating English into Latin and Greek, calm, sleepless, defiant of Boreas or any wind whatever. And strangers passing along the high-road at midnight, ay, or even long past that hour, would see the light blinking from the little window, and know that Sandie M‘Crae, the ploughman-student, as he was usually called, was hard at work.