ition; and
she had her reward. She lived to see her son gaining fame in letters,
and to find in him the utmost devotion a son can show to a mother. He
never forgot or failed to acknowledge his obligations to her. These were
undoubtedly great. She not only gave him, in part personally, his
education, but when that was finished, and she hoped to find peace for
her declining years in the little home she had prepared for herself, she
sacrificed that also to her hope of her son's advancement--her faith in
his talents and perseverance.

With the death of her husband, perhaps also on account of that of her
father, and the loss of her two little sons, Mrs Burton's pecuniary
position seems to have become somewhat easier. Whilst her son John was
destined for business in Aberdeen, she had built a small house for her
own occupation in the neighbourhood. When he set his mind on the higher
walk of his profession, and desired to come to the Scotch Bar, the
necessary expense could only be compassed by the devoted mother selling
her newly built house, and casting in her lot with her son. She, her
young daughter, and an Aberdeenshire maiden (so primitive in her ideas,
that she conceived the only way of reaching Edinburgh from Warriston
must be by _wading_ the Water of Leith), followed John to Edinburgh, and
took up their abode in a very small house on the north side of Warriston
Crescent in the year 1831.

Dr Burton was no great letter-writer. After he began, as he said, to
write for print, he considered it waste of time to write anything which
was not to be printed, except in briefest form. His letters to his wife
and family during absences on the Continent or elsewhere, seldom
contained more than a bare itinerary, past and future, often referring
them for particulars to the article in 'Blackwood,' which was to grow
out of his travels.

His mother was naturally the recipient of the writing which came before
the days of print,--before the days of penny postage also. Almost every
letter contains a history of how his mother's last reached him, as well
as how he hoped to have that which he is writing conveyed to her without
paying the awful tax of postage.

The next letters here offered belong to the beginning of his Edinburgh
life, and relate to a feat of mental exertion equal to his bodily
performances. He was at the time living in lodgings, for the purpose of
passing his legal examinations preparatory to coming to the Bar; but he
ma