Niger

genuine thrill of interest in the boy. Why did he
refuse the Church, the obvious refuge not only for
his apparent gravity and decorum, but for his
mental fears and imaginings liable to such sad
bruisings in the sterner ways of the world ? Why
not carry the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and
his novels, books and books and yet more books,
into the refuge of a manse, a pulpit, a shovel-hat and
a hilarious collar ?
But the books had brought him more than the
tenebrous imaginings of fear. The Scots ballads
could have widened his geographical horizons little :
they deal with the doings of a little people on a dark
little stage, an unhappy questing people, haunted
by the unpleasant physical after-effects of death. So
we must leave to the nameless novels the main¬
springs of Mungo’s refusal—these, and no doubt
other books that lifted his horizons from around the
dreaming banks of Yarrow and flung them far across
the deserts of Africa and the snows of America and
the heights of the Hindu mountains into strange
lands and climes, where beasts were un-Scots and
untamed, and in blue waters strange plants waved
their glassy fronds and the oyster opened its pearl-
lined valves. . . .
Perhaps not only the books. Mungo had lain on
the grass and the heath and the bells of the hills,
looked at the twining convolutions of the buttercups,
the purple bells of the heather-drops, watched the
busy insect-world at its play of life, looked at the
blood pulse down the veins in his own arm. He had
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