John Buchan

Prester John John Buchan

In this plain story of mine there will be so many wild doings ere the end is reached, that Ibeg my reader's assent to a prosaic digression. I will tell briefly the things which happenedbetween my sight of the man on the Kirkcaple sands and my voyage to Africa. I continuedfor three years at the burgh school, where my progress was less notable in my studies thanin my sports. One by one I saw my companions pass out of idle boyhood and be set toprofessions. Tam Dyke on two occasions ran off to sea in the Dutch schooners which usedto load with coal in our port; and finally his father gave him his will, and he wasapprenticed to the merchant service. Archie Leslie, who was a year my elder, was destinedfor the law, so he left Kirkcaple for an Edinburgh office, where he was also to take outclasses at the college. I remained on at school till I sat alone by myself in the highest class-a position of little dignity and deep loneliness. I had grown a tall, square-set lad, and myprowess at Rugby football was renowned beyond the parishes of Kirkcaple andPortincross. To my father I fear I was a disappointment. He had hoped for something in hisson more bookish and sedentary, more like his gentle, studious self. On one thing I was determined: I should follow a learned profession. The fear of being sentto an office, like so many of my schoolfellows, inspired me to the little progress I ever madein my studies. I chose the ministry, not, I fear, out of any reverence for the sacred calling, but because my father had followed it before me. Accordingly I was sent at the age ofsixteen for a year's finishing at the High School of Edinburgh, and the following winterbegan my Arts course at the university. If Fate had been kinder to me, I think I might have become a scholar. At any rate I was justacquiring a taste for philosophy and the dead languages when my father died suddenly of aparalytic shock, and I had to set about earning a living