The look of the
garden, and some of the offices, favour the latter idea."
"I have never seen the house," said Donal.
"You have not then been much about yet?" said Mr. Graeme.
"I have been so occupied with my pupil, and so delighted with all
that lay immediately around me, that I have gone nowhere--except,
indeed, to see Andrew Comin, the cobbler."
"Ah, you know him! I have heard of him as a remarkable man. There
was a clergyman here from Glasgow--I forget his name--so struck with
him he seemed actually to take him for a prophet. He said he was a
survival of the old mystics. For my part I have no turn for
extravagance."
"But," said Donal, in the tone of one merely suggesting a
possibility, "a thing that from the outside may seem an
extravagance, may look quite different when you get inside it."
"The more reason for keeping out of it! If acquaintance must make
you in love with it, the more air between you and it the better!"
"Would not such precaution as that keep you from gaining a true
knowledge of many things? Nothing almost can be known from what
people say."
"True; but there are things so plainly nonsense!"
"Yes; but there are things that seem to be nonsense, because the man
thinks he knows what they are when he does not. Who would know the
shape of a chair who took his idea of it from its shadow on the
floor? What idea can a man have of religion who knows nothing of it
except from what he hears at church?"
Mr.
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