The other principal banking-houses in Edinburgh at that time were Messrs. Mansfield & Co., William Cuming, William Hogg and Son, and William Alexander & Sons. The two first confined themselves strictly to the banking-business, in which they rose to great eminence from a very obscure origin. From a slender start in life, as a draper, old Mr. James Mansfield began to deal a little in bills of exchange, and by degrees founded a banking-house of the first celebrity in Scotland. In the same manner William Cuming succeeded to his father, old Patrick Cuming’s cloth-shops in the Parliament Close, which he afterwards converted into a counting-house where he confined himself entirely to the transacting of money business and after a long life left a very large fortune. William Hogg & Son were not in very extensive business and they managed it very confusedly. William Alexander & Sons were very considerable money-dealers, though their chief employment was purchasing tobacco for the Farmers-general of France (p. 9). * * * * * “John Coutts, the second son (of the late Lord Provost Coutts) under whose eye chiefly I served my apprenticeship, was one of the most agreeable men I ever knew. Lively and wellbred, and of very engaging manners, he had the happy talent of uniting a love of society and public amusements with a strict attention to business.... Having received his mercantile education in Holland, he had all the accuracy and all the strictness of a Dutchman; and, to his lessons it is that I owe any knowledge I possess of the principles of business, as well as an attachment to _form_ which I shall probably carry with me to the grave.... So strict was he in the discipline of the counting-house, that I slept but one night out of Edinburgh from the commencement of my apprenticeship in May 1754, till the month of September, 1760, when I obtained leave to go to Aberdeenshire with my mother to pay a visit to our relations” (p. 10). * * * * *