f the
stone, inhaled at every breath, had exerted the usual weakening effects
on the lungs--those effects under which the life of the stone-cutter is
restricted to about forty-five years; but it was only now, when working
day after day with wet feet in a water-logged ditch, that I began to be
sensibly informed, by a dull, depressing pain in the chest, and a
blood-stained mucoidal substance, expectorated with difficulty, that I
had already caught harm from my employment, and that my term of life
might fall far short of the average one. I resolved, however, as the
last year of my apprenticeship was fast drawing to its close, to
complete, at all hazards, my engagement with my master. It had been
merely a verbal engagement, and I might have broken it without blame,
when, unable to furnish me with work in his character as a master-mason,
he had to transfer my labour to another; but I had determined not to
break it, all the more doggedly from the circumstance that my uncle
James, in a moment of irritation, had said at its commencement that he
feared I would no more persist in being a mason than I had done in being
a scholar; and so I wrought perseveringly on; and slowly and painfully,
rood after rood, the wall grew up under our hands. My poor master, who
suffered even more from chopped hands and bleeding fingers than I did,
was cross and fretful, and sometimes sought relief in finding fault with
his apprentice; but, sobered by my forebodings of an early death, I used
to make no reply; and the hasty, ill-tempered expressions in which he
gave vent virtually to but his sense of pain and discomfort, were almost
always followed by some conciliatory remark. Superstition takes a strong
hold of the mind in circumstances such as those in which I was at this
time placed. One day when on the top of a tall building, part of which
we were throwing down to supply us with materials for our work, I raised
up a broad slab of red micaceous sandstone, thin as a roofing slate, and
exceedingly fragile, and, holding it out at arm's length, dropped it
over the wall. I had been worse than usual all that morning, and much
depressed; and, ere the slab parted from my hand, I said--looking
forward to but a few months of life--I shall break up like that
sandstone slab, and perish as little known. But the sandstone slab did
not break up: a sudden breeze blew it aslant as it fell; it cleared the
rough heap of stones below, where I had anticipated it would ha