Niger

inordinately shy, what of his suppressions and with
his readings, cowardly as only a Scot can be
cowardly. But one of his biographers finds this
unpalatable, and smarms upon the record the affir¬
mation ‘ Some sparks of latent spirit which occa¬
sionally flashed forth protected him from any
attempt at insult, to which his unsocial disposition
might have subjected him on the part of his noisy
school-fellows.’ But rather, one can hear their howls
of amusement, his school-fellows, surrounding and
tormenting in some playground corner a brown¬
faced silent boy.
His schoolmaster in later years had nothing to say
of him except that he was exceedingly fond of read¬
ing and 4 always the head of his class . Books, and
still the solitudes of the hills and windings of Yarrow,
remained to comfort him from both the raucous
voices of his schoolmates and the fatuous expecta¬
tions of Fowlshiels.
But at last in his fourteenth and fifteenth years he
had to face up to those expectations and make an
important decision. He had been early destined by
father Mungo and Mistress Park for training as a
minister of the Kirk of Scotland. He was so obvi¬
ously qualified by (yet again) ‘ the gravity and
steady decorum of his manner ’. And, just as it was
the ambition and intention of every Scots farmer to
produce at least one son who should receive college
education, so naturally it was expected of that son
that his education would flow from him in pulpit
periods. Curiously, one realises that the attitude
16