is 'stark naught.' It begins admirably, and prepares us to follow the fortunes of the two school-boy friends with the keenest sympathy and attention, as indeed we do up to the point at which Cruthers, now a yeoman farmer, visits and consoles his old class-mate Jonson, lying in Carlisle Castle under sentence of death for participation in the rebellion of the Forty-five. Later on the story slips limply out of the hand of its inventor and ends flatly enough. But the earlier part abounds in touches of the true Carlylean humour and pathos. The quarrel between the two boys, when Jonson, to avenge a drubbing at the hands of Cruthers, menaces his adversary with a large horse-pistol, to the dismay of Dominie Scroggs, is admirably related:
'The Dominie's jaw sank a considerable fraction of an ell; his colour went and came; he said, with a hollow tone, "The Lord be near us!" and sat down upon a stone by the wall-side, clasping his temples with both his hands, and then stooping till he grasped the whole firmly between his knees, to try if he could possibly determine what was to be done in this strange business. He spoke not for the space of three minutes and a half.'
One of the boys, he saw, must leave him; the only question was, which. Cruthers' father was a staunch yeoman who ploughed his own land, but was well-to-do. Jonson's was a laird who disdained the plough, who loved to hunt and gamble, and whose 'annual consumpt of whisky was very great.' Mr. Scroggs was a gentleman that knew the world, and at length he made up his mind:—
'"You Jonson," said he, rising gradually, "you have broken the peace of the school; you have been a quarrelsome fellow, and when Cruthers got the better of you, in place of yielding or complaining to me, you have gone home privily and procured fire-arms with intent, as I conceive, to murder, or at least mortally affright, a fellow Christian, an honest man's child; which, by the law of Moses, as you find in the Assembly's Shorter Catechism, and also by various Acts of Parliament, is a very heinous crime. You likewise owe me two quarters of school wages, which I do not expect you will ever pay; you cannot be here any longer. Go your ways, sirrah, and may all that's ill among us go with you."'
