ause, uninitiated by the experience of his profession in the
mystery of the parabolic curve, he fails, in taking aim, to make the
proper allowance for it. The mason is almost always a silent man: the
strain on his respiration is too great, when he is actively employed, to
leave the necessary freedom to the organs of speech; and so at least the
provincial builder or stone-cutter rarely or never becomes a democratic
orator. I have met with exceptional cases in the larger towns; but they
were the result of individual idiosyncrasies, developed in clubs and
taverns, and were not professional.

It is, however, with the character of our north-country masons that I
have at present chiefly to do. Living in small villages, or in cottages
in the country, they can very rarely procure employment in the
neighbourhood of their dwellings, and so they are usually content to
regard these as simply their homes for the winter and earlier spring
months, when they have nothing to do, and to remove for work to other
parts of the country, where bridges, or harbours, or farm-steadings are
in the course of building--to be subjected there to the influences of
what is known as the barrack, or rather bothy life. These barracks or
bothies are almost always of the most miserable description. I have
lived in hovels that were invariably flooded in wet weather by the
overflowings of neighbouring swamps, and through whose roofs I could
tell the hour at night, by marking from my bed the stars that were
passing over the openings along the ridge: I have resided in other
dwellings of rather higher pretensions, in which I have been awakened
during every heavier night-shower by the rain-drops splashing upon my
face where I lay a-bed. I remember that Uncle James, in urging me not to
become a mason, told me that a neighbouring laird, when asked why he
left a crazy old building standing behind a group of neat modern
offices, informed the querist that it was not altogether through bad
taste the hovel was spared, but from the circumstance that he found it
of great convenience every time his speculations brought a _drove of
pigs_ or _a squad of masons_ the way. And my after experience showed me
that the story might not be in the least apocryphal, and that masons had
reason at times for not touching their hats to gentlemen.

In these barracks the food is of the plainest and coarsest description:
oatmeal forms its staple, with milk, when milk can be had, which is not