‘Ah, well; it’s the same thing. Good-day, my boy,’ said I.
The little fellow got up, draped as he was in his ragged plaid, and putting one hand with the precious pennies into his pocket, solemnly extended to me the other.
‘I dare say,’ said I to myself, as I looked back and saw the child counting over his treasure once more with eager eyes, ‘I dare say there isn’t a happier creature this day between Land’s End and John O’Groats, than this herd-boy, in his lonely hut on the sodden, dreary moorland!’
And so it is, all the world over. I should think myself very hardly used by fortune, if I had to live alone in a grimy city for six months on five-and-thirty pounds, and had to get up every day before dawn to grind away at Latin and Greek; yet here is young Lindsay with his blue eyes ready to leap out of his head with excitement and delight at the bare prospect of it! It is a curious world. But I must look after my packing; for in order to reach Glasgow to-morrow, we must be stirring long before daylight. Till we meet, then,
Your affectionate cousin,
Hubert.
CHAPTER V.
THE SHIP SETS SAIL.
A sudden change in the weather had whitened the fields of the Castle Farm, and covered the puddles in the narrow lane with thin clear sheets of ice. Little or nothing was said at the breakfast-table; but as Alec Lindsay went into the empty kitchen to fasten a card on his little cow-hide trunk, his sister followed him, and stood over him in silence till one of the men came in, lifted the box, and carried it away.
‘You will write home every week, won’t you, Alec?’ she said.