Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely Romance

ss joy. The very sun seemed swelling in his heart as he walked home with his father. A whole day of home and its pleasures was before him-only the more welcome that he had had a holiday

ening out of his father's bedroom; but Cosmo had a feeling of inexhaustible wealth in them-partly because his father had not yet allowed him to read everything there, but restricted him to certain of the shelves-as much to cultivate self-restraint in him as to keep one or two of the books from him,-partly because he read books so that they remained books to him, and he believed in them after he had read them, nor imagined himself capable of exhausting them. But the range of his taste was certainly not a limited one. While he revelled in The Arabian Nights, he read also, and with no small enjoyment, the Night Thoughts-books, it will be confessed, considerably apart both in scope and in style. But while thus, for purest pleasure, fond of reading, to enjoy life it was to him enough

the mune, The reid gowd

for which nobody could account. Cosmo's mother too had been, in a fragmentary way, fond of verse; and although he could not remember many of her favour

eldom, quick to close; But of bread a wid

is an

run swift: "Speed," quoth

t: They serve as dim lights on the all but vanish

ad been all his own. Still, he had quite a different feeling for that portion which yet lay within the sorely contracted marches; to have seen any smallest nook of that sold, would have been like to break his heart. In him the love of place was in danger of becoming a disease. There was in it something, I fear, of the nature, if not of the avarice that grasps, yet of the avarice that clings. He was generous as few in the matter of money, but then he had had so little-not half enough to learn to love it! Nor had he the slightest idea of any mode in which to mak

im, now that the school was closed against him; and that he had come to the conclusion to ask his fri

to fear harm from him would be to sin against the truth. A man must learn to judge for himself, and he will teach you that. I have seen in him so much t

e believes in ghosts

herein. And in the history of the world, the imagination has, I fancy, been quite as often right as the intellect, and the things in which it has been right, have been of much the greater importance. Only, unhappily, wherever Pegasus has shown the way through a bog the pack-horse which follows gets the praise of crossing it; while the blunders with which the pack-horse is burdened, are, the moment each is discovered, by the plodding leaders of the pair transferred to the space betwixt the wings of Pegasus, without regard to the beauty of his feathers. The laird was therefore unable to speak with authority respecting such things, and was not particularly anxious to influence the mind of his son concerning them. Happily, in those days the platitudes and weary vulgarities of what they call SPIRITUALISM, had not been heard of in those quarters, and the

ting his father's silence, and remembering that he

e makes such a face at anything he calls superstition, tha

s father, "that the dread of superstition might amount to sup

think so

r. Simon so reasonable, even where I could not follow hi

in a universe of marvels of which we know only the outsides,-and which we turn into the incredible by taking the mere outsides for all, even while we know the roots of the seen remain unseen-these spiritual facts now began to dawn upon him, and fell in most naturally with those his mind had alrea

ay, "What a lovely night!" we speak of a breach, a rift in the old night. There is light more or less, positive light, else were there no beauty. Many a night is but a low starry day, a day with a softene