ill not bestow one of these
days on a little business of routine, that would put twenty shillings
in his pocket--a strange mixture of frugality and industry, and negligent
indolence--I don't know what to make of him."

But in process of time his pupil gained the means of making what he
pleased of himself; for his father having died, was not long survived by
his eldest son, an arrant fisher and fowler, who departed this life, in
consequence of a cold caught in his vocation, while shooting ducks in
the swamp called Kittlefittingmoss, notwithstanding his having drunk a
bottle of brandy that very night to keep the cold out of his stomach.
Jonathan, therefore, succeeded to the estate, and with it to the means
of subsisting without the hated drudgery of the law. His wishes were
very moderate; and as the rent of his small property rose with the
improvement of the country, it soon greatly exceeded his wants and
expenditure; and though too indolent to make money, he was by no means
insensible to the pleasure of beholding it accumulate. The burghers of
the town near which he lived regarded him with a sort of envy, as one
who affected to divide himself from their rank in society, and whose
studies and pleasures seemed to them alike incomprehensible. Still,
however, a sort of hereditary respect for the Laird of Monkbarns,
augmented by the knowledge of his being a ready-money man, kept up his
consequence with this class of his neighbours. The country gentlemen
were generally above him in fortune, and beneath him in intellect,
and, excepting one with whom he lived in habits of intimacy, had little
intercourse with Mr. Oldbuck of Monkbarns. He, had, however, the usual
resources, the company of the clergyman, and of the doctor, when he
chose to request it, and also his own pursuits and pleasures, being in
correspondence with most of the virtuosi of his time, who, like himself,
measured decayed entrenchments, made plans of ruined castles, read
illegible inscriptions, and wrote essays on medals in the proportion
of twelve pages to each letter of the legend. Some habits of hasty
irritation he had contracted, partly, it was said in the borough of
Fairport, from an early disappointment in love in virtue of which he had
commenced misogynist, as he called it, but yet more by the obsequious
attention paid to him by his maiden sister and his orphan niece, whom he
had trained to consider him as the greatest man upon earth, and whom he
used to bo