mittent gleam of the Inchkeith light now brightening and now fading, as the lanthorn revolved. In short, the winter passed not unpleasantly away: I had now nothing to annoy me in the work-shed; and my only serious care arose from my unlucky house in Leith, for which I found myself summoned one morning by an officer-looking man, to pay nearly three pounds,the last instalment which I owed, I was told, as one of the heritors of the place, for its fine new church. I must confess I was wicked enough to wish, on this occasion, that the property on the Coal-hill had been included in the judgment on the Musical Festival. But shortly after, not less to my astonishment than delight, I was informed by Mr. Veitch that he had at length found a purchaser for my house; and, after getting myself served heir to my father before the court of the Canongate, and paying a larger arrear of feu-duty to that venerable corporation, in which I had to recognize my feudal superior, I got myself as surely dissevered from the Coal-hill as paper and parchment could do it, and pocketed, in virtue of the transaction, a balance of about fifty pounds. As nearly as I could calculate on what the property had cost us, from first.to last, the composition which it paid was one of about five shillings in the pound. And such was the concluding passage in the history of a legacy which threatened for a time to be the ruin of the family. When I last passed along the Coal-hill, I saw my umquhile house existing as a bit of dingy wall, a single storey in height, and perforated by three narrow old-fashioned doors, jealously boarded up, and apparently, as in the days when it was mine, of no manner of use in the world. I trust, however, it is no longer the positive mischief to its proprietor that it was to me.

The busy season had now fairly commenced: wages were fast mounting up to the level of the former year, which they ultimately overtopped; and employment had become very abundant. I found, however, that it might be well for me to return home for a few months. The dust of the stone which I had been hewing for the last two years had begun to affect my lungs, as they had been affected in the last autumn of my ap

prenticeship, but much more severely; and I was too palpably sinking in flesh and strength to render it safe for me to encounter the consequences of another season of hard work as a stone-cutter. From the stage of the malady at which I had already arrived, poor workmen, unable to do what I did, throw themselves loose from their employment, and sink in six or eight months into the grave,-some at an earlier, some at a later period of life; but so general is the affection, that few of our Edinburgh stone-cutters pass their fortieth year unscathed, and not one out of every fifty of their number ever reaches his forty-fifth. I accordingly engaged my passage for the north in an Inverness sloop, and took leave of my few friends,—of the excellent foreman of the Niddry squad, and of Cha and John Wilson, with both of whom, notwithstanding their opposite characters, I had become very intimate. Among the rest, too, I took leave of a paternal cousin settled in Leith, the wife of a genial-hearted sailor, master of a now wholly obsolete type of vessel, one of the old Leith and London smacks, with a huge single mast, massive and tall as that of a frigate, and a mainsail of a quarter of an acre. I had received much kindness from my cousin, who, besides her relationship to my father, had been a contemporary and early friend of my mother's; and my welcome from the master her husband—one of the best-natured men I ever knew-used always to be one of the heartiest. And after parting from Cousin Marshall, I mustered up resolution enough to call on yet another cousin.

Cousin William, the eldest son of my Sutherlandshire aunt, had been for some years settled in Edinburgh, first as an upper clerk and manager,-for, after his failure as a merchant, he had to begin the world anew; and now, in the speculation year, he had succeeded in establishing a business for himself, which bore about it a hopeful and promising air so long as the over-genial season lasted, but fell, with many a more deeplyrooted establishment, in the tempest which followed. On quitting the north, I had been charged with a letter for him by his father, which I knew, however, to be wholly recommendatory of myself, and so I had failed to deliver it. Cousin

William, like Uncle James, had fully expected that I was to make my way in life in some one of the learned professions; and as his position-though, as the result unfortunately showed, a not very secúre one-was considerably in advance of mine, I kept aloof from him, in the character of a poor relation, who was quite as proud as he was poor, and in the belief that his new friends, of whom, I understood, he had now well nigh as many as before, would hold that the cousinship of a mere working man did him little credit. He had learned from home, however, that I was in Edinburgh, and had made not a few ineffectual attempts to find me out, of which I had heard; and now, on forming my resolution to return to the north, I waited upon him at his rooms in Ambrose's Lodgings, -at that time possessed of a sort of classical interest, as the famous Blackwood Club, with Christopher North at its head, used to meet in the hotel immediately below. Cousin William had a warm heart, and received me with great kindness, though I had, of course, to submit to the scold which I deserved; and as some young friends were to look in upon him in the evening, he said, I had to do, what I would fain have avoided, perform penance, by waiting, on his express invitation, to meet with them. They were, I ascertained, chiefly students of medicine and divinity, in attendance at the classes of the University, and not at all the formidable sort of persons I had feared to meet; and finding nothing very unattainable in their conversation, and as Cousin William made a dead set on me "to bring me out," I at length ventured to mingle in it, and found my reading stand me in some stead. There was a meeting, we were told, that evening, in the apartment below, of the Blackwood Club. The night I spent with my cousin was, if our information was correct, and the Noctes not a mere myth, one of the famous Noctes Ambrosiana; and fain would I have seen, for but a moment, from some quiet corner, the men whose names fame had blown so widely; but I have ever been unlucky in the curiosity-though I have always strongly entertained it—which has the personal appearance of cele brated men for its object. I had ere now several times lin

gered in Castle Street of a Saturday evening, opposite the house of Sir Walter Scott, in the hope of catching a glimpse of that great writer and genial man, but had never been successful. I could fain, too, have seen Hogg (who at the time occasionally visited Edinburgh); with Jeffrey; old Dugald Stewart, who still lived; Delta, and Professor Wilson; but I quitted the place without seeing any of them; and ere I again returned to the capital, ten years after, death had been busy in the high places, and the greatest of their number was no longer to be seen. In short, Dr. M'Crie was the only man whose name promises to live, of whose personal appearance I was able to carry away with me at this time a distinct image. Addison makes his Spectator remark, rather in joke than earnest, that " a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author." I am inclined to say nearly as much, without being in the least in joke. I think I understand an author all the better for knowing exactly how he looked. I would have to regard the massive vehemence of the style of Chalmers as considerably less characteristic of the man, had it been dissociated from the broad chest and mighty structure of bone; and the warlike spirit which breathes, in a subdued but still very palpable form, in the historical writings of the elder M'Crie, strikes me as singularly in harmony with the military air of this Presbyterian minister of the type of Knox and Melville. However theologians may settle the meaning of the text, it is one of the grand lessons of his writings, that such of the Churches of the Reformation as did not "take the sword, perished by the sword."

I was accompanied to the vessel by my friend William Ross, from whom I, alas! parted for the last time; and, when stepping aboard, Cousin William, whom I had scarce expected to see, but who had snatched an hour from business, and walked down all the way to Leith to bid me farewell, came forward

to grasp me by the hand. I am not much disposed to quarrel with the pride of the working man, when, according to Johnson and Chalmers, it is a defensive, not an aggressive pride; but it does at times lead him to be somewhat less than just to the better feelings of the men who occupy places in the scale a little higher than his own. Cousin William, from whom I had kept so jealously aloof, had a heart of the finest water. His after course was rough and unprosperous. After the general crash of 1825–26, he struggled on in London for some six or eight years, in circumstances of great difficulty; and then, receiving some subordinate appointment in connection with the Stipendiary Magistracy of the West Indies, he sailed for Jamaica, where considerably turned of fifty at the time -he soon fell a victim to the climate.

In my voyage north, I spent about half as many days on sea, between Leith Roads and the Souters of Cromarty, as the Cunard steamers now spend in crossing the Atlantic. I had taken a cabin passage, not caring to subject my weakened lungs to the exposure of a steerage one; but during the seven days of thick, foggy mornings, clear moonlight nights, and almost unbroken calms, both night and morning, in which we tided our slow way north, I was much in the forecastle with the men, seeing how sailors lived, and ascertaining what they were thinking about, and how. We had rare narratives at nights,

"Wonderful stories of battle and wreck,
That were told by the men of the watch."

Some of the crew had been voyagers in their time to distant parts of the world; and though no existence can be more monotonous than the every-day life of the seaman, the profession has always its bits of striking incident, that, when strung together, impart to it an air of interest which its ordinary de. tails sadly want, and which lures but to disappoint the young lads of a romantic cast who are led to make choice of it in its presumed character as a continued series of stirring events and exciting adventures. What, however, struck me as cu