He told me once of a ride of his into Dundee, in the dusk of evening, with £300 in his pocket, all he had in the world, and of a certain nervousness that came over him, in consequence of the disturbed state of the times and the roughness of the neighbourhood, lest he should be attacked and robbed. The story had no special significance for me at the moment, save that I wondered what Carlyle could have been doing so far north out of his usual track as Dundee. It seems to me now, however, that the date must have been the spring of 1824, when he parted with the Buller family at Kinnaird House, on his way southwards, to recruit himself, if possible, for meeting them again in London and there resuming the tutorship. Dundee or Perth would then be a likely station on his southward journey; and he had been in the receipt by this time of two years of his salary from the Bullers. On that supposition, remembering that his intermediate receipts before his marriage and settlement in Edinburgh had been £180 for his _Wilhelm Meister_, together with something further of the Buller salary for resumption of duty in London,—but that there had been expenses for his nine months in London and Birmingham, some loss in the year’s farming speculation at Hoddam Hill, and the necessary costs of his removal and marriage, and of furnishing the house in Comely Bank,—we may fairly conclude that he cannot have begun housekeeping in October in 1826 with more than a clear £100 or so. His literary earnings in the next eighteen months, if the whole of his remuneration for the _German Romance_ fell in then, may have been about £300 for that work, together with about £150 for his four articles in the _Edinburgh_ and the _Foreign Review_. Compute the expense of the Comely Bank household, rent included, as necessarily not less than about £300 a year; and it will be seen that, in the beginning of 1828, Carlyle may well have felt that if he remained in Edinburgh he was in danger of running aground.