become greatly less common on their steep sides than in the
days of my boyhood; and both the fox and otter are less frequently seen.
It is not uninteresting to mark with the eye of the geologist, how
palpably in the course of a single lifetime--still nearly twenty years
short of the term fixed by the Psalmist--these wild animals have been
posting on in Scotland to that extinction which overtook, within its
precincts, during the human period, the bear, the beaver, and the wolf,
and of which the past history of the globe, as inscribed on its rocks,
furnishes so strong a record.

Winter passed in the usual pursuits; and I commenced the working season
of a new year by assisting my old master to inclose with a stone wall a
little bit of ground, which he had bought on speculation, but had failed
in getting feued out for buildings. My services, however, were
gratuitous--given merely to eke out the rather indifferent bargain that
the old man had been able to drive in his own behalf for my labours as
an apprentice; and when our job was finished, it became necessary that I
should look out for employment of a more profitable character. There was
not much doing in the north; but work promised to be abundant in the
great towns of the south: the disastrous building mania of 1824-25 had
just begun, and, after some little hesitation, I resolved on trying
whether I could not make my way as a mechanic among the stone-cutters of
Edinburgh perhaps the most skilful in their profession in the world. I
was, besides, desirous to get rid of a little property in Leith, which
had cost the family great annoyance, and not a little money, but from
which, so long as the nominal proprietor was a minor, we could not shake
ourselves loose. It was a house on the Coal-hill, or rather the
self-contained ground-floor of a house, which had fallen to my father
through the death of a relative, so immediately before his own death
that he had not entered upon possession. It was burdened with legacies
to the amount of nearly two hundred pounds; but then the yearly rent
amounted to twenty-four pounds; and my mother, acting on the advice of
friends, and deeming the investment a good one, had no sooner recovered
the insurance-money of my father's vessel from the underwriter, than she
handed the greater part of it to the legatees, and took possession of
the property in my behalf. Alas! never was there a more unfortunate
inheritance or worse investment. It had been let