terms; likewise silk stockings washed in the most approved style; also grave-clothes made on the shortest notice." One would naturally imagine that all these professions of activity must have indicated a thrifty, industrious, moral, happy home. Alas, no! In 1789 Williamson was obliged to divorce his second wife, the mother of several children; and the revolting details of the inquiry show too plainly that the degraded woman pursued another profession besides those efforts of decent industry which her husband advertised to the world. She, on her part, charged her husband with having acquired tipling habits, and keeping low dissipated company; while she stated that, notwithstanding the considerable sums that passed through his hands in the course of his various speculations, his family were frequently subjected to great privations. The inquiries connected with the divorce exhibit throughout, tokens of sordid squalor, which show that Williamson was little fitted to seize the tides of fortune that so frequently ran in his favour, or to direct his energies into any satisfactory path of self-advancement. Active and turbulent as he had been--dreaded, admired, nay, respected for his services as a citizen--he had never bettered his condition, or risen above the rank of the vagabond. His total want of early education may have unfitted him to take advantage of his opportunities. "The reader," he says, in one of his pamphlets, "will be here asking what school I was brought up at? I shall only tell them, that the extent of it was upwards of four thousand miles, and the height thereof as high as the heavens, governed by Indians of many nations; and regular education is no way taught among them, but handed down from one generation to another; and their records are kept, marked with tomahawks on the outside of trees, and can be distinguished by themselves for centuries back." It might be a sublime school--but not a hopeful seminary for sober citizens. Yet, among Kay's exquisitely hard etchings there is a portrait of Peter, from which it is evident that lie must have been a very handsome worshipful-looking man, with that well-fed self-assured air--that corporation dignity of manner, and citizen urbanity, if one may use the expression, which beseem the corporate officer. Nature and the tailor seem at the moment to have united to represent in his person a Deacon at least, if not a Bailie. He is depicted in conversation with Abyssinian Bruce, and as saying to the haughty Lord of Kinnaird--"There is more truth in one page of my Edinburgh directory, than in all your five volumes 4to; so, when you talk to me, don't imagine yourself at the source of the Nile." Poor Williamson's eventful life came to an end on the 19th January 1769. THE REPEALER'S WISH GRANTED.[24]--AN IRISH TALE. IN ONE SHORT CHAPTER.