d, and found those whom we
feared might be interested to withhold the settlement, alert and prompt
to assist us.

Mr. Charles Argent is naturally more familiar than his father. He has a
little dash of pleasantry in his manner, with a shrewd good-humoured
fashionable air, that renders him soon an agreeable acquaintance. He
entered with singular felicity at once into the character of the Doctor
and my mother, and waggishly drolled, as if he did not understand them,
in order, I could perceive, to draw out the simplicity of their
apprehensions. He quite won the old lady's economical heart, by offering
to frank her letters, for he is in Parliament. "You have probably," said
he slyly, "friends in the country, to whom you may be desirous of
communicating the result of your journey to London; send your letters to
me, and I will forward them, and any that you expect may also come under
cover to my address, for postage is very expensive."

As we were taking our leave, after being fully instructed in all the
preliminary steps to be taken before the transfers of the funded property
can be made, he asked me, in a friendly manner, to dine with him this
evening, and I never accepted an invitation with more pleasure. I
consider his acquaintance a most agreeable acquisition, and not one of
the least of those advantages which this new opulence has put it in my
power to attain. The incidents, indeed, of this day, have been all
highly gratifying, and the new and brighter phase in which I have seen
the mercantile character, as it is connected with the greatness and glory
of my country--is in itself equivalent to an accession of useful
knowledge. I can no longer wonder at the vast power which the British
Government wielded during the late war, when I reflect that the method
and promptitude of the house of Messrs. Argent and Company is common to
all the great commercial concerns from which the statesmen derived, as
from so many reservoirs, those immense pecuniary supplies, which enabled
them to beggar all the resources of a political despotism, the most
unbounded, both in power and principle, of any tyranny that ever existed
so long.--Yours, etc.,

ANDREW PRINGLE.

CHAPTER IV--THE TOWN

There was a great tea-drinking held in the Kirkgate of Irvine, at the
house of Miss Mally Glencairn; and at that assemblage of rank, beauty,
and fashion, among other delicacies of t