chinned
stripling of little more than five feet three. And certainly my friend,
as I learned from him nearly three years after, failed on this occasion
to recognise me. But believing that he did, and that he did not choose
to reckon among his friends a humble working man, I returned to my home
very sad, and, I am afraid, not a little angry; and, locking up the
supposed slight in my breast, as of too delicate a nature to be
communicated to any one, for more than two years from this time I did
not again cross his path.

I was now my own master, and commenced work as a journeyman in behalf of
one of my maternal aunts--the aunt who had gone so many years before to
live with her aged relative, the cousin of my father, and the mother of
his first wife. Aunt Jenny had resided for many years after this time
with an aged widow lady, who had lived apart in quiet gentility on very
small means; and now that she was dead, my aunt saw her vocation gone,
and wished that she too could live apart, a life of humble independency,
supporting herself by her spinning-wheel, and by now and then knitting a
stocking. She feared, however, to encounter the formidable drain on her
means of a half-yearly room-rent; and, as there was a little bit of
ground at the head of the strip of garden left me by my father, which
bordered on a road that, communicating between town and country, bore,
as is common in the north of Scotland, the French name of the _Pays_, it
occurred to me that I might try my hand, as a skilled mechanic, in
erecting upon it a cottage for Aunt Jenny. Masons have, of course, more
in their power in the way of house-building than any other class of
mechanics. It was necessary, however, that there should be money
provided for the purchase of wood for the roof, and for the carting of
the necessary stones and mortar; and I had none. But Aunt Jenny had
saved a few pounds, and a very few proved sufficient; and so I built a
cottage in the _Pays_, of a single room and a closet, as my first job,
which, if not very elegant, or of large accommodation, came fully up to
Aunt Jenny's ideas of comfort, and which, for at least a quarter of a
century, has served her as a home. It was completed before Whitsunday,
and I then deliberated on setting myself to seek after employment of a
more remunerative kind, with just a little of the feeling to which we
owe one of the best-known elegiac poems in the language--the "Man was
made to Mourn" of Burns. "There