On the further bank of the stream, perfuming the air, grew many bushes of meadow-sweet, or queen-of-the-meadow, as it is called in Scotland; and beyond lay a lovely stretch of nearly level pasture.

Farther eastward all was a plain, full of farms.

Behind him rose the hill, shutting out his past; before him lay the plain, open to his eyes and feet.

God had walled up his past, and was disclosing his future.
When he had eaten his dinner, its dryness forgotten in the condiment his book supplied, he rose, and taking his cap from his head, filled it from the stream, and drank heartily; then emptied it, shook the last drops from it, and put it again upon his head.
"Ho, ho, young man!" cried a voice.
Donal looked, and saw a man in the garb of a clergyman regarding him from the road, and wiping his face with his sleeve.
"You should mind," he continued, "how you scatter your favours." "I beg your pardon, sir," said Donal, taking off his cap again; "I hadna a notion there was leevin' cratur near me." "It's a fine day!" said the minister.
"It is that, sir!" answered Donal.
"Which way are you going ?" asked the minister, adding, as if in apology for his seeming curiosity, "-- You're a scholar, I see!"-- with a glance towards the book he had left open on his stone.
"Nae sae muckle as I wad fain be, sir," answered Donal--then called to mind a resolve he had made to speak English for the future.
"A modest youth, I see!" returned the clergyman; but Donal hardly liked the tone in which he said it.
"That depends on what you mean by a scholar," he said.
"Oh!" answered the minister, not thinking much about his reply, but in a bantering humour willing to draw the lad out, "the learned man modestly calls himself a scholar." "Then there was no modesty in saying I was not so much of a scholar as I should like to be; every scholar would say the same." "A very good answer!" said the clergyman patronizingly, "You'll be a learned man some day!" And he smiled as he said it.
"When would you call a man learned ?" asked Donal.
"That is hard to determine, seeing those that claim to be contradict each other so." "What good then can there be in wanting to be learned ?" "You get the mental discipline of study." "It seems to me," said Donal, "a pity to get a body's discipline on what may be worthless.

It's just as good discipline to my teeth to dine on bread and cheese, as it would be to exercise them on sheep's grass." "I've got hold of a humorist!" said the clergyman to himself.
Donal picked up his wallet and his book, and came down to the road.
Then first the clergyman saw that he was barefooted.