d, we parted.

Though verse and old English failed me, the simple statement made by my
Cromarty friend to my townsman located in Inverness, that I was a good
workman, and wanted work, procured me at once the cutting of an
inscription, and two little jobs in Cromarty besides, which I was to
execute on my return home. The Inverness job was soon completed; but I
had the near prospect of another; and as the little bit of the public
that came my way approved of my cutting, I trusted employment would flow
in apace. I lodged with a worthy old widow, conscientious and devout,
and ever doing her humble work consciously in the eye of the Great
Taskmaster--one of a class of persons not at all so numerous in the
world as might be desirable, but sufficiently common to render it rather
a marvel that some of our modern masters of fiction should never have
chanced--judging from their writings--to come in contact with any of
them. She had an only son, a working cabinetmaker, who used occasionally
to annoy her by his silly jokes at serious things, and who was courting
at this time a sweetheart who had five hundred pounds in the bank--an
immensely large sum to a man in his circumstances. He had urged his suit
with such apparent success, that the marriage-day was fixed and at hand,
and the house which he had engaged as his future residence fully
furnished. And it was his prospective brother-in-law who was to be my
new employer, so soon as the wedding should leave him leisure enough to
furnish epitaphs for two tombstones recently placed in the family
burying-ground. The wedding-day arrived; and, to be out of the way of
the bustle and the pageant, I retired to the house of a neighbour, a
carpenter, whom I had obliged by a few lessons in practical geometry and
architectural drawing. The carpenter was at the wedding; and, with the
whole house to myself, I was engaged in writing, when up flew the door,
and in rushed my pupil the carpenter. "What has happened?" I asked.
"Happened!" said the carpenter,--"Happened!! The bride's away with
another man!! The bridegroom has taken to his bed, and raves like a
madman; and his poor old mother--good honest woman--is crying like a
child. Do come and see what can be done." I accompanied him to my
landlady's, where I found the bridegroom in a paroxysm of mingled grief
and rage, congratulating himself on his escape, and bemoaning his
unhappy disappointment, by turns. He lay athwart the bed, which he told
me i