404 JOHN DUNCAN, WEAVER AND BOTANIST. ' 



age ! May none of us ever catch the most distant glimpse 

 of such agony ! 



But lying there in the dark would not mend matters. 

 Bread must be found, somewhere and somehow. Dire 

 necessity thus nerved his sick heart, and he rose to finish 

 the web he had in his loom, looking for more to follow. 

 Hope increased with busy hands, work came when this was 

 done, strength grew with exercise, and the future brightened. 

 For a whole year after this taste of despair, he struggled 

 on, bravely facing the fiend that had grappled with him in 

 the darkness and even now stood grimly and cruelly in the 

 near distance, with relentless look towards him. 



It was in vain. He could not win enough to support 

 dear life. But he was never again plunged into the 

 hopelessness from which he had then escaped. With the 

 resolution that had upheld him throughout life, even in the 

 bitter waters of his home and heart, he now nerved himself 

 for what seemed to him the knell of life at least, of all 

 happiness. In soul-crying silence, without a word spoken 

 to any one, he went down the Leochel side one winter 

 morning, on the 2nd of November, 1874 to beg a 

 pauper's portion ! Ah, the pangs unutterable that act 

 involved to such a man ! How sad his heart, how dark his 

 prospects, how distant God, as he trudged with reluctant 

 feet along the familiar paths, which now looked so different, 

 on that forbidding errand ! Even the very flowers that 

 might have comforted him, as they did Wordsworth,* in his 

 woe, were dead and hidden from view beneath the bitter 

 frost and snow. Often, often as the same misery has been 



* See his poem, composed after the death of his only brother, the 

 original of his portrait of " The Happy Warrior." 



