I would freely
give one half of them to call your father father, though he should
scold me for my idleness every hour of the day, and to call you brother,
though a brother whose merits would throw my own so completely into the
shade.

The faint, yet not improbable, belief has often come across me, that
your father knows something more about my birth and condition than he
is willing to communicate; it is so unlikely that I should be left in
Edinburgh at six years old, without any other recommendation than
the regular payment of my board to old M--, [Probably Mathieson,
the predecessor of Dr. Adams, to whose memory the author and his
contemporaries owe a deep debt of gratitude.] of the High School.
Before that time, as I have often told you, I have but a recollection
of unbounded indulgence on my mother's part, and the most tyrannical
exertion of caprice on my own. I remember still how bitterly she
sighed, how vainly she strove to soothe me, while, in the full energy
of despotism, I roared like ten bull-calves, for something which it was
impossible to procure for me. She is dead, that kind, that ill-rewarded
mother! I remember the long faces--the darkened rooms--the black
hangings--the mysterious impression made upon my mind by the hearse and
mourning coaches, and the difficulty which I had to reconcile all this
to the disappearance of my mother. I do not think I had before this
event formed, any idea, of death, or that I had even heard of that final
consummation of all that lives. The first acquaintance which I formed
with it deprived me of my only relation.

A clergyman of venerable appearance, our only visitor, was my guide
and companion in a journey of considerable length; and in the charge of
another elderly man, substituted in his place, I know not how or why, I
completed my journey to Scotland--and this is all I recollect.

I repeat the little history now, as I have a hundred times before,
merely because I would wring some sense out of it. Turn, then, thy
sharp, wire-drawing, lawyer-like ingenuity to the same task--make up my
history as though thou wert shaping the blundering allegations of some
blue-bonneted, hard-headed client, into a condescendence of facts
and circumstances, and thou shalt be, not my Apollo--QUID TIBI CUM
LYRA?--but my Lord Stair, [Celebrated as a Scottish lawyer.] Meanwhile,
I have written myself out of my melancholy and blue devils, merely by
prosing about them; so I will now converse half