In them Truth took to him shape; in them she submitted herself to his contemplation.

He grew faster, and from the days of his mourning emerged more of a man, and abler to look the world in the face.
From that time also he learned and understood more rapidly, though he never came to show any great superiority in the faculties most prized of this world, whose judgment differs from that of God's kingdom in regard to the comparative value of intellectual gifts almost as much as it does in regard to the relative value of the moral and the intellectual.

Not the less desirable however did it seem in the eyes of both his father and his tutor, that, if it could anyhow be managed, he should go the next winter to college.
As to how it could be managed, the laird took much serious thought, but saw no glimmer of light in the darkness of apparent impossibility.

An unsuspected oracle was however at hand.
Old servants of the true sort, have, I fancy, a kind of family instinct.

From the air about them almost, from the personal carriage, from words dropped that were never meant for them, from the thoughtful, troubled, or eager look, and the sought or avoided conference, they get possessed by a notion both of how the wind is blowing, and of how the ship wants to sail.