a gentleman." The maternal maxim sunk deeply into my heart,
and I never for a moment have forgotten it.

Notwithstanding this aristocratical resolution, the great practical
question, "How am I to live?" began to thrust itself unpleasantly
before me. I am one of that unfortunate class who have neither uncles
nor aunts. For me, no yellow liverless individual, with characteristic
bamboo and pigtail--emblems of half a million--returned to his native
shores from Ceylon or remote Penang. For me, no venerable spinster
hoarded in the Trongate, permitting herself few luxuries during a
long-protracted life, save a lass and a lanthorn, a parrot, and the
invariable baudrons of antiquity. No such luck was mine. Had all
Glasgow perished by some vast epidemic, I should not have found myself
one farthing the richer. There would have been no golden balsam for me
in the accumulated woes of Tradestown, Shettleston, and Camlachie. The
time has been when--according to Washington Irving and other veracious
historians--a young man had no sooner got into difficulties than a
guardian angel appeared to him in a dream, with the information that
at such and such a bridge, or under such and such a tree, he might
find, at a slight expenditure of labour, a gallipot secured with
bladder, and filled with glittering tomauns; or in the extremity of
despair, the youth had only to append himself to a cord, and
straightaway the other end thereof, forsaking its staple in the roof,
would disclose amidst the fractured ceiling the glories of a
profitable pose. These blessed days have long since gone by--at any
rate, no such luck was mine. My guardian angel was either woefully
ignorant of metallurgy, or the stores had been surreptitiously
ransacked; and as to the other expedient, I frankly confess I should
have liked some better security for its result, than the precedent of
the "Heir of Lynn."

It is a great consolation amidst all the evils of life, to know that,
however bad your circumstances may be, there is always somebody else
in nearly the same predicament. My chosen friend and ally, Bob
M'Corkindale, was equally hard up with myself, and, if possible, more
averse to exertion. Bob was essentially a speculative man--that is, in
a philosophical sense. He had once got hold of a stray volume of Adam
Smith, and muddled his brains for a whole week over the intricacies of
the _Wealth of Nations_. The result was a crude farrago of notions
regarding the true natu