was a literary
cabinet-maker in the neighbourhood, who had once actually composed a
poem of thirty lines on the Hill of Cromarty, whose collection of books,
chiefly poetical, amounted to from about eighty to a hundred. I used to
be often at nights in the workshop of the cabinet-maker, and was
sometimes privileged to hear him repeat his poem. There was not much
admiration of poets or poetry in the place; and my praise, though that
of a very young critic, had always the double merit of being both ample
and sincere. I knew the very rocks and trees which his description
embraced,--had heard the birds to which he referred, and seen the
flowers; and as the Hill had been of old a frequent scene of executions,
and had borne the gallows of the sheriffdom on its crest, nothing could
be more definite than the grave reference, in his opening line, to

"The verdant rising of the _Gallow_-hill."

And so I thought a very great deal of his poem, and what I thought I
said; and he, on the other hand, evidently regarded me as a lad of
extraordinary taste and discernment for my years. There was another
mechanic in the neighbourhood,--a house-carpenter, who, though not a
poet, was deeply read in books of all kinds, from the plays of Farquhar
to the sermons of Flavel; and as both his father and grandfather--the
latter, by the way, a Porteous-mob man, and the former a personal friend
of poor Fergusson the poet--had also been readers and collectors of
books, he possessed a whole pressful of tattered, hard-working volumes,
some of them very curious ones; and to me he liberally extended, what
literary men always value, "the full freedom of the press." But of all
my occasional benefactors in this way, by far the greatest was poor old
Francie, the retired clerk and supercargo.

Francie was naturally a man of fair talent and active curiosity. Nor was
he by any means deficient in acquirement. He wrote and figured well, and
knew a good deal about at least the theory of business; and when
articled in early life to a Cromarty merchant and shopkeeper, it was
with tolerably fair prospects of getting on in the world. He had,
however, a certain infirmity of brain, which rendered both talent and
acquirement of but little avail, and that began to manifest itself very
early. While yet an apprentice, on ascertaining that the way was clear,
he used, though grown a tall lad, to bolt out from behind the counter
into the middle of a green directly opposi