Riches indubitably favour stupidity; poverty, where the heart is right, favours mental and moral development.

They parted at the gate, and Cosmo went to bed.
But, although his father allowed him such plentiful liberty, and would fain have the boy feel the night holy as the day--so that no one ever asked where he had been, or at what hour he had come home--a question which, having no watch, he would have found it hard to answer--not an eye was closed in the house until his entering footsteps were heard.

The grandmother lay angry at the unheard of liberty her son gave his son; it was neither decent nor in order; it was against all ancient rule of family life; she must speak about it! But she never did speak about it, for she was now in her turn afraid of the son who, without a particle of obstinacy in his composition, yet took what she called his own way.

Grizzie kept grumbling to herself that the laddie was sure to come to "mischief;" but the main forms of "mischief" that ruled in her imagination were tramps, precipices, and spates.

The laird, for his part, spent most of the time his son's absence kept him awake, in praying for him--not that he might be the restorer of the family, but that he might be able to accept the will of God as the best thing for family as for individual.