“A grand compliment,” cried the girl, with another peel of laughter. “A jeely fish! But,” she added, quickly, “I think it is awfully nice of you, Johnny; for those are the sort of things, I know, that you like best in the world.”
“Not quite,” said the naturalist. “There are things I care for far more than beasts, and if you don’t know that, you are not so quick at the uptake as I have always thought you; but what is the good when I am nobody, and never will be anybody, if I were to howk and ferret for new beasts till I die!”
“Bide a wee, bide a wee,” said Elsie, laughing, but confused; “you will be a placed minister, and as good as any of them; and what could ye have better than that?”
“I am the most unfortunate man in the world,” said Johnny, “for you know that, which is the only way for a poor lad like me, it is not what I want.”
“And you are not blate to say so to me that am a minister’s daughter, and very proud of it,” cried Elsie, with a flush of offence.
“That’s just the worst of it,” said Johnny, sadly, shaking his head, “for maybe you, and certainly other folk, will believe indeed I am not blate, thinking too much of myself, not to be content with a kirk if I could get one. But you should know it isn’t that. I think too little of myself. Never could I be a man like your father, that is one of the excellent of the earth. It is the like of him, and not the like of me, that should be a minister. And then whatever I was, and wherever I was,” he added, with a humility that was almost comic, “I would always have something inside teasing me to be after the beasts all the same.”
“What are you going to do with it now?” said Elsie, looking down at the unconscious object of all this discussion, which lay semi-transparent, and a little dulled in the delicate mauve colour of its interesting markings, on the bed she had made of the tangles of the dulse at her feet.
“The first thing is, I will draw a picture of it, the best I can,” said Johnny, rousing to something of his usual enthusiasm, “and then I will dissect it and get at its secrets, and I will send the drawing and the account of it to London—and then——”
“And then?” repeated Elsie.
“I will just wait,” he said. His eyes which had been lighted up with eagerness and spirit sank, and he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. “Just as likely as not I will never hear word of it more. That’s been my fate already. I must just steel myself not to hope.”