CHAPTER XLI. 



THE SECRET? 



THE school did nothing for John Duncan ; as far as 

 scholastic matters were concerned, the man was totally 

 unlettered. He was never inside a school door, except the 

 few evenings he took in the night school at Drumlithie, 

 when about twenty, after he had made some progress in 

 reading under the tuition of the kindly women that first 

 taught him the letters. His disadvantages in this respect 

 were the greatest possible, and sadly affected his progress 

 throughout life, in spite of his indomitable will and cease- 

 less industry to remove them, making even reading a con- 

 stant and trying toil. But these early losses only make 

 his after triumphs in study all the more remarkable, and 

 raise them near to the rank of genius. Think of a lad 

 brought up alone with an unwedded mother, whose poverty 

 was so extreme as barely to supply the simplest needs of 

 both, and whose living had to be eked out by her little boy 

 selling rushlights ; * left of necessity, like a city arab, to run 



* One fact is a striking proof of their extreme poverty. His 

 mother, not being able to afford to buy vegetables for dinner, used to 

 send Johnnie to the roadsides and hedges to gather the young shoots 

 of the stinging nettle (Urtica urens] to make " nettle broth," then more 

 common than now among the indigent ; but, what was very unusual, 



