ts character, and very local in its name,
might well regard as liberal.

Linlithgow was the place fixed on by the parent bank as the scene of my
initiation into the mysteries of branch banking; and, taking my passage
in one of the track-boats which at that time plied on the Canal between
Edinburgh and Glasgow, I reached the fine old burgh as the brief winter
day was coming to a close, and was seated next morning at my desk, not a
hundred yards from the spot on which Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh had taken
his stand when he shot the good Regent. I was, as I had anticipated,
very stupid; and must have looked, I suppose, even more obtuse than I
actually was: for my temporary superior the agent, having gone to
Edinburgh a few days after my arrival, gave expression, in the head
bank, to the conviction that it would be in vain attempting making "yon
man" an accountant. Altogether deficient in the cleverness that can
promptly master isolated details, when in ignorance of their bearing on
the general scheme to which they belong, I could literally do nothing
until I had got a hold of the system; which, locked up in the ponderous
tomes of the agency, for some little time eluded my grasp. At length,
however, it gradually unrolled itself before me in all its nice
proportions, as one of perhaps the completest forms of "book-keeping"
which the wit of man has yet devised; and I then found that the details
which, when I had approached them as if from the outside, had repulsed
and beaten me back, could, like the outworks of a fortress, be commanded
from the centre with the utmost ease. Just as I had reached this stage,
the regular accountant of the branch was called away to an appointment
in one of the joint stock banks of England; and the agent, again going
into Edinburgh on business, left me for the greater part of a day in
direction of the agency. Little more than a fortnight had elapsed since
he had given his unfavourable verdict; and he was now asked how, in the
absence of the accountant, he could have got away from his charge. He
had left _me_ in the office, he said. "What! the _Incompetent_?" "O,
that," he replied, "is all a mistake; the Incompetent has already
mastered our system." The mechanical ability, however, came but slowly;
and I never acquired the facility, in running up columns of summations,
of the early-taught accountant; though, making up by diligence what I
wanted in speed, I found, after my first few weeks of labour in