y remain workers to the last; and that no attempt to
raise individual working men above their own class into the
professional or mercantile classes can ever greatly benefit the working
masses as a whole. What is most of all desirable is that the
condition, the aims, and the tastes of working men, as working men,
should be raised and bettered; that without necessarily going outside
their own ranks, they should become more prudent, more thrifty, better
educated, and wider-minded than many of their predecessors have been in
the past. Under such circumstances, it is surely well to set before
ourselves some examples of working men who, while still remaining
members of their own class, have in the truest and best sense "raised
themselves" so as to attain the respect and admiration of others
whether their equals or superiors in the artificial scale. Dr. Smiles,
who has done much to illustrate the history of the picked men among the
labouring orders, has chosen two or three lives of such a sort for
investigation, and from them we may select a single one as an example
of a working man's career rendered conspicuous by qualities other than
those that usually secure external success.

Thomas Edward, associate of the Linnean Society, though a Scotchman all
his life long, was accidentally born (so to speak) at Gosport, near
Portsmouth, on Christmas Day, 1814. His father was in the Fifeshire
militia, and in those warlike days, when almost all the regulars were
on the Continent, fighting Napoleon, militia regiments used to be
ordered about the country from one place to another, to watch the coast
or mount guard over the French prisoners, in the most unaccountable
fashion. So it happened, oddly enough, that Thomas Edward, a Scotchman
of the Scotch, was born close under the big forts of Portsmouth harbour.

After Waterloo, however, the Fifeshire regiment was sent home again;
and the militia being before long disbanded, John Edward, our hero's
father, went to live at Aberdeen, where he plied his poor trade of a
hand-loom linen weaver for many years. It was on the green at
Aberdeen, surrounded by small labourers' cottages, that Thomas Edward
passed his early days. From his babyhood, almost, the boy had a strong
love for all the beasties he saw everywhere around him; a fondness for
birds and animals, and a habit of taming them which can seldom be
acquired, but which seems with some people to come instinctively by
nature. While Tam w