g that by this time I would have been a rich man. But
it is not the things I have done that vex me so much as the things I
have not done. I feel that I could have accomplished so much more. I had
the will, but I wanted the means."

It is in this way that such men feel toward the close of their lives.
Thomas Edward still lives, in his sixty-seventh year, at Banff, in
Scotland, rich in his pension of fifty pounds a year, which is more than
twice as much as the income he had when he supported by his labor a wife
and eleven children. Even his specimens now command a price, and he is
every way a prosperous gentleman. It seems a pity that such men cannot
have their precious little fifty pounds to begin with, instead of to end
with. But who could pick them out? What mortal eye can discern in a man
the _genuine_ celestial fire before he has proved its existence by the
devotion of a lifetime to his object? And even if it could be discerned
in a young man, the fifty pounds a year might quench it.

ROBERT DICK,

BAKER AND NATURALIST.

The most northern county of Scotland is Caithness, a wild region of
mountain, marsh, and rock-ribbed headlands, in which the storms of the
Atlantic have worn every variety of fantastic indentation. Much of the
land has been reclaimed in modern days by rich proprietors. There are
manufactures of linen, wool, rope, and straw, besides important
fisheries; so that forty thousand people now find habitation and
subsistence in the county. There are castles, too, ancient and
modern,--some in ruins, some of yesterday,--the summer home of wealthy
people from the south.

The coast is among the most picturesque in the world, bearing a strong
resemblance to the coast of Maine. The reader, perhaps, has never seen
the coast of Maine. Then let him do so speedily, and he will know, as he
sails along its bold headlands, and its seamed walls of rock rising here
and there into mountains, how the coast of Caithness looked to one of
the noblest men that ever lived in it, Robert Dick, baker of Thurso.
Thurso is the most northern town of this most northern county. It is
situated on Thurso Bay, which affords a good harbor, and it has thus
grown to be a place of three or four thousand inhabitants. From this
town the Orkney Islands can be seen, and a good walker can reach in a
day's tramp Dunnet Head, the lofty promontory which ends the Island.

Here lived, labored, studied, and died, Robert Dick, a man whose nam