n-at-arms for contending in my own behalf in
the battle of life. Inured to labour, and to the hardships of the bothie
and the barrack, I believed that in the backwoods, where I would have to
lift my axe on great trees, I might get on with my clearing and my crops
like most of my neighbours; but then the backwoods would, I feared, be
no place for her; and as for effectually pushing my way in the
long-peopled portions of the United States, among one of the most
vigorous and energetic races in the world, I could not see that I was in
the least fitted for that. She, however, thought otherwise. The tender
passion is always a strangely exaggerative one. Lodged in the male mind,
it gives to the object on which it rests all that is excellent in woman,
and in the female mind imparts to its object all that is noble in man;
and my friend had come to regard me as fitted by nature either to head
an army or lead a college, and to deem it one of the weaknesses of my
character, that I myself could not take an equally favourable view.
There was, however, one profession of which, measuring myself as
carefully as I could, I deemed myself capable: I saw men whom I regarded
as not my superiors in natural talent, and even possessed of no greater
command of the pen, occupying respectable places in the periodical
literature of the day, as the editors of Scotch newspapers, provincial,
and even metropolitan, and deriving from their labours incomes of from
one to three hundred pounds per annum; and were my abilities, such as
they were, to be fairly set by sample before the public, and so brought
into the literary market, they might, I thought, possibly lead to my
engagement as a newspaper editor. And so, as a first step in the
process, I resolved on publishing my volume of traditional history--a
work on which I had bestowed considerable care, and which, regarded as a
specimen of what I could do as a _litterateur_, would, I believed, show
not inadequately my ability of treating at least those lighter subjects
with which newspaper editors are occasionally called on to deal.

Nearly two of the three twelvemonths passed by, however, and I was still
an operative mason. With all my solicitude, I could not give myself
heartily to seek work of the kind which I saw newspaper editors had at
that time to do. It might be quite well enough, I thought, for the
lawyer to be a special pleader. With special pleadings equally extreme
on the opposite sides of a case