, warlocks, and evil-spirits, I made
Benjie take off his clothes and lie down beside him, as I said, to keep
him warm; but, in plain matter of fact, (between friends,) that the
callant might sleep sounder, finding himself in a strange bed, and not
very sure as to how the house stood as to the matter of a good name.

Knowing by my own common sense, and from long experience of the ways of a
wicked world, that there is nothing like industry, I went to Mungo's
bedside in the morning, and wakened him betimes. Indeed, I'm leeing
there--I need not call it wakening him--for Benjie told me, when he was
supping his parritch out of his luggie at breakfast-time, that he never
winked an eye all night, and that sometimes he heard him greeting to
himself in the dark--such and so powerful is our love of home and the
force of natural affection. Howsoever, as I was saying, I took him ben
the house with me down to the workshop, where I had begun to cut out a
pair of nankeen trowsers for a young lad that was to be married the week
after to a servant-maid of Maister Wiggie's,--a trig quean, that
afterwards made him a good wife, and the father of a numerous small
family.

Speaking of nankeen, I would advise every one, as a friend, to buy the
Indian, and not the British kind--the expense of outlay being ill hained,
even at sixpence a-yard--the latter not standing the washing, but making
a man's legs, at a distance, look like a yellow yorline.

It behoved me now as a maister, bent on the improvement of his prentice,
to commence learning Mungo some few of the mysteries of our trade; so
having showed him the way to crock his hough, (example is better than
precept, as James Batter observes,) I taught him the plan of holding the
needle; and having fitted his middle-finger with a bottomless thimble of
our own sort, I set him to sewing the cotton-lining into one leg, knowing
that it was a part not very particular, and not very likely to be seen;
so that the matter was not great, whether the stitching was exactly
regular, or rather in the zigzag line. As is customary with all new
beginners, he made a desperate awkward hand at it, and of which I would
of course have said nothing, but that he chanced to brog his thumb, and
completely soiled the whole piece of work with the stains of blood;
which, for one thing, could not wash out without being seen; and, for
another, was an unlucky omen to happen to a marriage garment.

Every man should be on his