n of the family. When I last passed along the
Coal-hill, I saw my umquhile house existing as a bit of dingy wall, a
single storey in height, and perforated by three narrow old-fashioned
doors, jealously boarded up, and apparently, as in the days when it was
mine, of no manner of use in the world. I trust, however, it is no
longer the positive mischief to its proprietor that it was to me.

The busy season had now fairly commenced: wages were fast mounting up to
the level of the former year, which they ultimately overtopped; and
employment had become very abundant. I found, however, that it might be
well for me to return home for a few months. The dust of the stone which
I had been hewing for the last two years had begun to affect my lungs,
as they had been affected in the last autumn of my apprenticeship, but
much more severely; and I was too palpably sinking in flesh and strength
to render it safe for me to encounter the consequences of another season
of hard work as a stone-cutter. From the stage of the malady at which I
had already arrived, poor workmen, unable to do what I did, throw
themselves loose from their employment, and sink in six or eight months
into the grave--some at an earlier, some at a later period of life; but
so general is the affection, that few of our Edinburgh stone-cutters
pass their fortieth year unscathed, and not one out of every fifty of
their number ever reaches his forty-fifth year. I accordingly engaged my
passage for the north in an Inverness sloop, and took leave of my few
friends--of the excellent foreman of the Niddry squad, and of Cha and
John Wilson, with both of whom, notwithstanding their opposite
characters, I had become very intimate. Among the rest, too, I took
leave of a paternal cousin settled in Leith, the wife of a
genial-hearted sailor, master of a now wholly obsolete type of vessel,
one of the old Leith and London smacks, with a huge single mast, massive
and tall as that of a frigate, and a mainsail of a quarter of an acre. I
had received much kindness from my cousin, who, besides her relationship
to my father, had been a contemporary and early friend of my mother's;
and my welcome from the master her husband--one of the best-natured men
I ever knew--used always to be one of the heartiest. And after parting
from Cousin Marshall, I mustered up resolution enough to call on yet
another cousin.

Cousin William, the eldest son of my Sutherlandshire aunt, had been for
some years