bones, and were so badly amputated as to leave delicate protuberances, calculated to be a torment for life. This unfortunate circumstance, by producing a certain degree of lameness and difficulty in walking, no doubt helped to make Robert the studious and thoughtful man he was. Thus, indisposed to boyish sports, his progress in education was rapid. Indeed as William confesses, he was left far behind. In 1813, the family difficulties came to a head, and an emigration from Peebles to the gude auld town of Edinburgh was necessitated. Henceforth the mother seems to have been the head of the family. Chambers senior seems to have been a bit of an incumbrance. Poor themselves, they were surrounded by companions in misfortune. Widows of decayed tradesmen, teachers in the decline of life too old to teach, licensed preachers to whom an unkind fate had denied all church preferments, genteel unmarried women who had known better times, and who had now to eke out a precarious existence by colouring maps, or sewing fine needlework for the repository. This little pauperised colony, clinging as it were on to the skirts of respectability, was located on flats in that part of Edinburgh where rents were not of the highest, nor the houses of the grandest architectural character. Here they met with noteworthy individuals, and here William found his first situation as a bookseller’s assistant, with the magnificent salary of four shillings a-week. Lad as he was, William then laid down a resolution, which was not only heroical, considering the depressed circumstances of his family, which may not only be held up as an example to others, but which laid most assuredly the foundation of his success in after-life. “From necessity,” he tells us, “not less than from choice, I resolved to make the weekly four shillings serve for everything. I cannot remember entertaining the slightest despondency on the subject.” For a lad of fourteen thus to resolve, showed that he had the right spirit to conquer circumstances, and to win an old age of respectability and renown. As at this time his father was appointed commercial manager of a salt manufactory, called Joppa Pans—a smoky, odorous place, consisting of a group of buildings situated on the sea-shore, half-way between Portobello and Musselburgh—William was left by himself in Edinburgh to do the best he could. Of course he went to lodge with a Peebles woman, and was surrounded by a host of Peebleshire people, whose delight in the evening was to call up reminiscences of texts, and preachers, and sermons, and to discuss Boston’s “Marrow,” the “Crook in the Lot,” and the “Fourfold State.” It is to be feared we have not much improved on this. Such modes of spending the evening were certainly quite equal to the modern ones of frequenting music-halls, or of reading some of the trash now issued from the press. We must add that William Chambers had read Franklin’s autobiography, and had imbibed somewhat of his spirit.