s the lark, instead of being a pleasure, came to be
looked forward to with trouble and anxiety, weighing on my heart as a
care, and on my shoulders as a burden.

Finding but too severely that such was the case, and that there is no
contending with the course of nature, I took sweet counsel together with
James Batter over a cup of tea and a cookie, concerning what it was best
for a man placed in my circumstances to betake myself to.

As industry ever has its own reward, let me without brag or boasting be
allowed to state, that, in my own case, it did not disappoint my
exertions. I had sat down a tenant, and I was now not only the landlord
of my own house and shop, but of all the back tenements to the head of
the garden, as also of the row of one-story houses behind, facing to the
loan, in the centre of which Lucky Thamson keeps up the sign of the
Tankard and Tappit Hen. It was also a relief to my mind, as the head of
my family, that we had cut Benjie loose from his mother's apron-string,
poor fellow, and set him adrift in an honest way of doing to buffet the
stormy ocean of life; so, every thing considered, it was found that
enough and to spare had been laid past by Nanse and me to spend the
evening of our days by the lound dykeside of domestic comfort.

In Tammie Bodkin, to whom I trust I had been a dutiful, as I know I was
an honoured master, I found a faithful journeyman, he having served me in
that capacity for nine years; so, it is not miraculous, being constantly,
during that period, under my attentive eye, that he was now quite a
deacon in all the departments of the business. As an eident scholar he
had his reward; for customers, especially during the latter years, when
my sight was scarcely so good, came at length to be not very scrupulous
as to whether their cloth was cut by the man or his master. Never let
filial piety be overlooked:--when I first patronized Tammie, and promoted
him to the dignity of sitting crosslegged along with me on the working-
board, he was a hatless and shoeless ragamuffin, the orphan lad of a
widowed mother, whose husband had been killed by a chain-shot, which
carried off his head, at the bloody battle of the Nile, under Lord
Nelson. Tammie was the oldest of four, and the other three were lasses,
that knew not in the morning where the day's providing was to come from,
except by trust in Him who sent the ravens to Elijah. By allowing Tammie
a trifle for board-wages, I was enabled