hat always lands
those who indulge in it in the hapless position of the inferior workman.
I trust I may further add, that I was an honest mechanic. It was one of
the maxims of Uncle James, that as the Jews, restricted by law to their
forty stripes, always fell short of the legal number by one, lest they
should by any accident exceed it, so a working man, in order to balance
any disturbing element of selfishness in his disposition, should bring
his charges for work done, slightly but sensibly within what he deemed
the proper mark, and so give, as he used to express himself, his
"customers the cast of the baulk." I do think I acted up to the maxim;
and that, without injuring my brother workmen by lowering their prices,
I never yet charged an employer for a piece of work that, fairly
measured and valued, would not be rated at a slightly higher sum than
that at which it stood in my account.

I had quitted Cromarty for the south late in November, and landed at
Leith on a bleak December morning, just in time to escape a tremendous
storm of wind and rain from the west, which, had it caught the smack in
which I sailed on the Firth, would have driven us all back to
Fraserburgh, and, as the vessel was hardly sea-worthy at the time,
perhaps a great deal further. The passage had been stormy; and a very
noble, but rather unsocial fellow-passenger--a fine specimen of the
golden eagle--had been sea-sick, and evidently very uncomfortable, for
the greater part of the way. The eagle must have been accustomed to
motion a great deal more rapid than that of the vessel, but it was
motion of a different kind; and so he fared as persons do who never feel
a qualm when hurried along a railway at the rate of forty miles an hour,
but who yet get very squeamish in a tossing boat, that creeps through a
rough sea at a speed not exceeding, in the same period of time, from
four to five knots. The day preceding the storm was leaden-hued and
sombre, and so calm, that though the little wind there was blew the
right way, it carried us on, from the first light of morning, when we
found ourselves abreast of the Bass, to only near Inchkeith; for when
night fell, we saw the May light twinkling dimly far astern, and that of
the Inch rising bright and high right a-head. I spent the greater part
of the day on deck, marking, as they came into view, the various
objects--hill, and island, and seaport town, of which I had lost sight
nearly ten years before; feeling t