-builder, by whom I was
engaged to work at a manor-house a few miles to the south of Edinburgh.
And procuring "lodgings" in a small cottage of but a single apartment,
near the village of Niddry Mill, I commenced my labours as a hewer under
the shade of the Niddry woods.

There was a party of sixteen masons employed at Niddry, besides
apprentices and labourers. They were accomplished
stone-cutters--skilful, especially in the cutting of mouldings, far
above the average of the masons of the north country; and it was with
some little solicitude that I set myself to labour beside them on
mullions, and transoms, and labels--for our work was in the old English
style--a style in which I had no previous practice. I was diligent,
however, and kept old John Fraser's principle in view (though, as Nature
had been less liberal in imparting the necessary faculties, I could not
cut so directly as he used to do on the required planes and curves
inclosed in the stones); and I had the satisfaction of finding, when
pay-night came round, that the foreman, who had frequently stood beside
me during the week to observe my modes of working, and the progress
which I made, estimated my services at the same rate as he did those of
the others. I was by and by intrusted, too, like the best of them, with
all the more difficult kinds of work required in the erection, and was
at one time engaged for six weeks together in fashioning long, slim,
deeply-moulded mullions, not one of which broke in my hands, though the
stone on which I wrought was brittle and gritty, and but indifferently
suited for the nicer purposes of the architect. I soon found, however,
that most of my brother workmen regarded me with undisguised hostility
and dislike, and would have been better pleased had I, as they seemed to
expect, from the northern locality in which I had been reared, broken
down in the trial. I was, they said, "a Highlander newly come to
Scotland," and, if not chased northwards again, would carry home with me
half the money of the country. Some of the builders used to criticize
very unfairly the workmanship of the stones which I hewed: they could
not lay them, they said; and the hewers sometimes refused to assist me
in carrying in or in turning the weightier blocks on which I wrought.
The foreman, however, a worthy, pious man, a member of a Secession
congregation, stood my friend and encouraged me to persevere. "Do not,"
he has said, "suffer yourself to be driven