"Od, I draid, Andro man, we have lost our good barrow." He was at first of opinion that I would do him little credit as a workman: in my absent fits I was well-nigh as impervious to instruction as he himself was insensible to danger; and I laboured under the further disadvantage of knowing a little, as an amateur, of both hewing and building, from the circumstance, that when the undertakings of my schoolboy days involved, as they sometimes did, the erection of a house, I used always to be selected as the mason of the party. And all that I had learned on these occasions I had now to unlearn. In the course of a few months, however, I did unlearn it all; and then, acquiring in less than a fortnight a very considerable mastery over the mallet--for mine was one of the not unfrequent cases in which the mechanical knock seems, after many an abortive attempt, to be caught up at once--I astonished Uncle David one morning by setting myself to compete with him, and by hewing nearly two feet of pavement for his one. And on this occasion my aunt, his wife, who had been no stranger to his previous complaints, was informed that her "stupid nephew" was to turn out "a grand workman after all." A life of toil has, however, its peculiar temptations. When overwrought, and in my depressed moods, I learned to regard the ardent spirits of the dram-shop as high luxuries: they gave lightness and energy to both body and mind, and substituted for a state of dulness and gloom, one of exhilaration and enjoyment. Usquebaugh was simply happiness doled out by the glass, and sold by the gill. The drinking usages of the profession in which I laboured were at this time many: when a foundation was laid, the workmen were treated to drink; they were treated to drink when the walls were levelled for laying the joists; they were treated to drink when the building was finished; they were treated to drink when an apprentice joined the squad; treated to drink when his "apron was washed;" treated to drink when "his time was out;" and occasionally they learned to treat one another to drink. In laying down the foundation-stone of one of the larger houses built this year by Uncle David and his partner, the workmen had a royal "founding-pint," and two whole glasses of the whisky came to my share. A full-grown man would not have deemed a gill of usquebaugh an overdose, but it was considerably too much for me; and when the party broke up, and I got home to my books, I found, as I opened the pages of a favourite author, the letters dancing before my eyes, and that I could no longer master the sense. I have the volume at present before me--a small edition of the Essays of Bacon, a good deal worn at the corners by the friction of the pocket; for of Bacon I never tired. The condition into which I had brought myself was, I felt, one of degradation. I had sunk, by my own act, for the time, to a lower level of intelligence than that on which