Εwan lay with his hands under his head, drowsing and thinking of Quaritch and his tale when both had gone down to their supper. Now the night was coming in by, lamps lighted; through the window and up through the night the ghost-radiance of Footforthie flecked the blind.—People thought that kind of a story funny, everyone laughed, Quaritch had expected him to laugh, and he hadn’t, he’d seen nothing funny about it. What was funny in a queer old wreck like Piddle falling into a dirty hole in the Mile? He’d hurt himself a bit, no doubt—that the fun? Enjoyment of seeing another look ridiculous? And he thought of innumerable stories he’d heard, overheard when a boy, been told in Duncairn with loud guffaws and glazed eyes of mirth—about women and their silly, unfortunate bodies, about babies and death and disease and dirt, and something he supposed was lacking in him, Robert had once told him he was born a prig, he’d no humour and couldn’t be cheerful and lusty and scrabble in filth and call it fun. Fun? Real fun enough in the world—fun in the roar of the furnaces, in a sweeping door and a dripping trough of blazing metal a-pour on the castings, fun in the following of formulae through trick on trick in the twists of maths, fun in the stars wheeling at night with long lights over the whoom of Footforthie, the breathtaking glister of the Galaxy. Fun in the deadness of Duncairn after midnight, you could stand by the edge of Royal Mile where it wheeled to the moving blackness of Paldy and think the end of the world had come—the shining dead streets of this land long hence, waving in grass, beasts lairing in culverts, the sea creeping up and up on Footforthie and a clamour of seals on the rocky points where once they launched the fisher-fleets, men long gone from the earth, not wiped out, not lost, vanished an invading host to the skies, to alien planets and the furthest stars, storming at last the rooftops of heaven, earth remote from their vision as the womb and its dreams remote from the memory of an adult man—

He woke late that evening to hear a commotion in the next-door bedroom, empty till then. Low talk and quick steps, Mrs Cleghorn, Chris, then a shivering bang, silence, a cough. Then Ma Cleghorn whispering Will that have waked Ewan?

His own door was opened a minute later and Chris came in, walking pussy-foot, she stood and listened till he called out soft, ’Lo, Chris. What’s all the row next door?

She said she was sorry they’d woken him up, a new lodger was coming in a hurry, late, and they were making her up a bit bed.

Ewan said he saw. What was she like?

Chris didn’t know, a lass up from Dundee, the new schoolteacher at the Ecclesgriegs Middle—English, she’d heard, though she hadn’t yet seen her—

Then she saw with a smile that Εwan was asleep, human beings were never of much interest to him.