oulders, and
you are free as any of the Faculty to sue or defend. Then will I step
forth, Alan, and in a character which even your father will allow may be
more useful to you than had I shared this splendid termination of your
legal studies. In a word, if I cannot be a counsel, I am determined to
be a CLIENT, a sort of person without whom a lawsuit would be as dull
as a supposed case. Yes, I am determined to give you your first fee. One
can easily, I am assured, get into a lawsuit--it is only the getting out
which is sometimes found troublesome;--and, with your kind father for
an agent, and you for my counsel learned in the law, and the worshipful
Master Samuel Griffiths to back me, a few sessions shall not tire my
patience. In short, I will make my way into court, even if it should
cost me the committing a DELICT, or at least a QUASI DELICT.--You see
all is not lost of what Erskine wrote, and Wallace taught.

Thus far I have fooled it off well enough; and yet, Alan, all is not
at ease within me. I am affected with a sense of loneliness, the more
depressing, that it seems to me to be a solitude peculiarly my own. In a
country where all the world have a circle of consanguinity, extending to
sixth cousins at least, I am a solitary individual, having only one kind
heart to throb in unison with my own. If I were condemned to labour
for my bread, methinks I should less regard this peculiar species of
deprivation, The necessary communication of master and servant would be
at least a tie which would attach me to the rest of my kind--as it is,
my very independence seems to enhance the peculiarity of my situation.
I am in the world as a stranger in the crowded coffeehouse, where he
enters, calls for what refreshment he wants, pays his bill, and is
forgotten so soon as the waiter's mouth has pronounced his 'Thank ye,
sir.'

I know your good father would term this SINNING MY MERCIES, [A
peculiar Scottish phrase expressive of ingratitude for the favours of
Providence.] and ask how I should feel if, instead of being able to
throw down my reckoning, I were obliged to deprecate the resentment of
the landlord for consuming that which I could not pay for. I cannot tell
how it is; but, though this very reasonable reflection comes across me,
and though I do confess that four hundred a year in possession, eight
hundred in near prospect, and the L--d knows how many hundreds more in
the distance, are very pretty and comfortable things, yet