never of the largest, had been
for the last year on the decrease,--a herald would have emblazoned
it, "ARGENT, a money-bag improper, in detriment,"--and though the
attenuating process was not excessively rapid, it was, nevertheless,
proceeding at a steady ratio. As for the ordinary means and appliances
by which men contrive to recruit their exhausted exchequers, I knew
none of them. Work I abhorred with a detestation worthy of a scion of
nobility; and, I believe, you could just as soon have persuaded the
lineal representative of the Howards or Percys to exhibit himself in
the character of a mountebank, as have got me to trust my person on the
pinnacle of a three-legged stool. The rule of three is all very well
for base mechanical souls; but I flatter myself I have an intellect too
large to be limited to a ledger. "Augustus," said my poor mother to me,
while stroking my hyacinthine tresses, one fine morning, in the very
dawn and budding-time of my existence--"Augustus, my dear boy, whatever
you do, never forget that you are a gentleman." The maternal maxim sank
deeply into my heart, and I never for a moment have forgotten it.

Notwithstanding this aristocratic resolution, the great practical
question, "How am I to live?" began to thrust itself unpleasantly before
me. I am one of that unfortunate class who have neither uncles nor
aunts. For me, no yellow liverless individual, with characteristic
bamboo and pigtail,--emblems of half a million,--returned to his native
shores from Ceylon or remote Penang. For me, no venerable spinster
hoarded in the Trongate, permitting herself few luxuries during a
long protracted life, save a lass and a lanthorn, a parrot, and the
invariable baudrons of antiquity. No such luck was mine. Had all Glasgow
perished by some vast epidemic, I should not have found myself one
farthing the richer. There would have been no golden balsam for me in
the accumulated woes of Tradestown, Shettleston, and Camlachie. The
time has been when--according to Washington Irving and other veracious
historians--a young man had no sooner got into difficulties than a
guardian angel appeared to him in a dream, with the information that at
such and such a bridge, or under such and such a tree, he might find,
at a slight expenditure of labour, a gallipot secured with bladder,
and filled with glittering tomans; or, in the extremity of despair, the
youth had only to append himself to a cord, and straightway the other
end