tells how such an honest woman brought her a’e bottle as another was done, and the murdering loon had stolen it and put in a bottle of poison instead of it. Leper took to his heels, but was pursued and carried before a justice of the peace, where he told all he had done, which made the justice laugh heartily at the joke; and the tailor’s wife was well purged from her feigned sickness, laziness, and cursed ill nature; for always when she began to curl her nose for the future, the tailor had no more to say, but Maggy mind the bottle. Leper was working with a master-tailor in Glasgow, who hungered his men; and one morning, just when breakfast was set on the table, in comes a gentleman to try on a suit of clothes; the master being obliged to rise desired the lads to say the grace themselves. Every one refused it, and put it to his neighbour, till Leper undertook it, and said with an audible voice, that the stranger gentleman might overhear him as follows:--‘Och, hoch! we are a parcel of poor beastly bodies, and we are as beastly minded; if we do not work we get nothing to eat; yet we are always eating and always fretting; singing and half starving is like to be our fortune; scartings and scrapings are the most of our mouthfuls. We would fain thank thee for our benefactors are not worthy the acknowledging;--hey. Amen.’ The gentleman laughed till his sides were like to burst, and gave Leper half-a-crown to drink. Leper was not long done with his apprenticeship till he set up for himself, and got a journeyman and an apprentice, was coming into very good business, and had he restrained his roguish tricks, he might have done very well. He and his lads being employed to work in a farmer’s house, where the housewife was a great miser, and not very cleanly in making meat, and sneeveled through her nose greatly when she spoke.--In the morning, when she went to make the potage, she made a fashion of washing the pot, which to appearance seemed to him to have been among the first that had been made; then sets it before the fire till she went to the well, in which time Leper looking into it, sees two great holes stapped with clouts, he takes up his goose, and holds it as high as his head, then lets it drop into the pot, which knocked out the bottom of it; presently in comes the wife with the water, and pours it into the pot, which set the fireside all in a dam, for still as she poured in, it ran out: the wife being short-sighted, or what they call sand blind, looks into the pot, holds up both her hands and cries, ‘Losh preserve me, sirs, for the grip atween the twa holes is broken.’ Says Leper, the pot was old enough; but do you not ken that tailors potage is heavier than other mens. Indeed lad I believe it, but they say ye’re a warlock; its Wednesday all the world o’er, and a waefu’ Wednesday to me indeed, my pot might ha’e served me this fifty year, a sae wad it e’en.