pport himself in any thing like the state in which he deemed it
necessary for his father's son to live. Mr. Dymock was nearly thirty
years of age, at the time our history commences; he had been brought up
by an indolent father, and an aunt in whom no great trusts had been
vested, until he entered his teens, at which time he was sent to
Edinburgh to attend the classes in the college; and there, being a quick
and clever young man, though without any foundation of early discipline,
or good teaching, and without much plain judgment or common sense, he
distinguished himself as a sort of genius.

One of the most common defects in the minds of those who are not early
subjected to regular discipline is, that they have no perseverance; they
begin one thing, and another thing, but never carry anything on to any
purpose, and this was exactly the case with Mr. Dymock. Whilst he was in
Edinburgh he had thought that he would become an author; some
injudicious persons told him that he might succeed in that way, and he
began several poems, and two plays, and he wrote parts of several
treatises on Mathematics, and Physics, and Natural History; the very
titles of these works sound clever, but they were never finished. Dymock
was nearly thirty when his father died; and when he came to reside in
the tower, his mind turned altogether to a new object, and that was
cultivating the ground, and the wild commons and wastes all around him:
and if he had set to work in a rational way he might have done
something, but before he began the work he must needs invent a plough,
which was to do wonderful things, and, accordingly, he set to work, not
only to invent this plough, but to make it himself, or rather to put it
together himself, with the help of a carpenter and blacksmith in the
neighbourhood. But before we introduce the old blacksmith, who is a very
principal person in our story, we must describe the way in which Mr.
Dymock lived in his tower.

His aunt, Mrs. Margaret Dymock, was his housekeeper, and so careful had
she always been, for she had kept house for her brother, the late laird,
that the neighbours said she had half-starved herself, in order to keep
up some little show of old hospitality. In truth, the poor lady was
marvellously thin, and as sallow and gaunt as she was thin. Some old
lady who had stood for her at the font, in the reign of Charles the
Second, had, at her death, left her all her clothes, and these had been
sent to Dymock