The Right Stuff (Book 1&2)

The first and most-serious-but-one ordeal in the life of Robert Chalmers Fordyce-so Robert Chalmers himself informed me years afterwards-was the examination for the Bursary which he gained at Edinburgh University. A bursary is what an English undergraduate would call a "Schol." (Imagine a Scottish student talking about a "Burse"!) Robert Chalmers Fordyce arrived in Edinburgh pretty evenly divided between helpless stupefaction at the sight of a great city and stern determination not to be imposed upon by the inhabitants thereof. His fears were not as deep-seated as those of Tom Pinch on a similar occasion, -he, it will be remembered, suffered severe qualms from his familiarity with certain rural traditions concerning the composition of London pies, -but he was far from happy. He had never slept away from his native hillside before; he had never seen a town possessing more than three thousand inhabitants; and he had only once travelled in a trai