n
more exercised over the code which Menu propounded six hundred years
before the birth of Christ than over the knotty problems of Scottish law
in the nineteenth century. Hence it can hardly be wondered at that
as his learning accumulated his practice dissolved, until at the very
moment when he had attained the zenith of his celebrity he had also
reached the nadir of his fortunes.

There being no chair of Sanscrit in any of his native universities, and
no demand anywhere for the only mental wares which he had to dispose
of, we should have been forced to retire into genteel poverty, consoling
ourselves with the aphorisms and precepts of Firdousi, Omar Khayyam, and
others of his Eastern favourites, had it not been for the kindness
and liberality of his half-brother William Farintosh, the Laird of
Branksome, in Wigtownshire.

This William Farintosh was the proprietor of a landed estate, the
acreage which bore, unfortunately, a most disproportional relation to
its value, for it formed the bleakest and most barren tract of land
in the whole of a bleak and barren shire. As a bachelor, however, his
expenses had been small, and he had contrived from the rents of his
scattered cottages, and the sale of the Galloway nags, which he bred
upon the moors, not only to live as a laird should, but to put by a
considerable sum in the bank.

We had heard little from our kinsman during the days of our comparative
prosperity, but just as we were at our wit's end, there came a letter
like a ministering angel, giving us assurance of sympathy and succour.
In it the Laird of Branksome told us that one of his lungs had been
growing weaker for some time, and that Dr. Easterling, of Stranraer, had
strongly advised him to spend the few years which were left to him in
some more genial climate. He had determined, therefore to set out for
the South of Italy, and he begged that we should take up our residence
at Branksome in his absence, and that my father should act as his land
steward and agent at a salary which placed us above all fear of want.

Our mother had been dead for some years, so that there were only myself,
my father, and my sister Esther to consult, and it may be readily
imagined that it did not take us long to decide upon the acceptance
of the laird's generous offer. My father started for Wigtown that very
night, while Esther and I followed a few days afterwards, bearing with
us two potato-sacksful of learned books, and such other of