had received much kindness from my cousin, who, besides her relationship to my father, had been a contemporary and early friend of my mother's; and my welcome from the master her husband--one of the best-natured men I ever knew--used always to be one of the heartiest. And after parting from Cousin Marshall, I mustered up resolution enough to call on yet another cousin. Cousin William, the eldest son of my Sutherlandshire aunt, had been for some years settled in Edinburgh, first as an upper clerk and manager--for, after his failure as a merchant he had to begin the world anew; and now, in the speculation year, he had succeeded in establishing a business for himself, which bore about it a hopeful and promising air so long as the over-genial season lasted, but fell, with many a more deeply-rooted establishment, in the tempest which followed. On quitting the north, I had been charged with a letter for him by his father, which I knew, however, to be wholly recommendatory of myself, and so I had failed to deliver it. Cousin William, like Uncle James, had fully expected that I was to make my way in life in some one of the learned professions; and as his position--though, as the result unfortunately showed, a not very secure one--was considerably in advance of mine, I kept aloof from him, in the character of a poor relation, who was quite as proud as he was poor, and in the belief that his new friends, of whom, I understood, he had now well-nigh as many as before, would hold that the cousinship of a mere working man did him little credit. He had learned from home, however, that I was in Edinburgh, and had made not a few ineffectual attempts to find me out, of which I had heard; and now, on forming my resolution to return to the north, I waited upon him at his rooms in Ambrose's Lodgings--at that time possessed of a sort of classical interest, as the famous Blackwood Club, with Christopher North at its head, used to meet in the hotel immediately below. Cousin William had a warm heart, and received me with great kindness, though I had, of course, to submit to the scold which I deserved; and as some young friends were to look in upon him in the evening, he said, I had to do what I would fain have avoided, perform penance, by waiting, on his express invitation, to meet with them. They were, I ascertained, chiefly students of medicine and divinity, in attendance at the classes of the University, and not at all the formidable sort of persons I had feared to meet; and finding nothing very unattainable in their conversation, and as Cousin William made a dead set on me "to bring me out," I at length ventured to mingle in it, and found my reading stand me in some stead. There was a meeting, we were told, that evening, in the apartment below, of the Blackwood Club. The night I spent with my cousin was, if our information was correct, and the _Noctes_ not a mere myth, one of the famous _Noctes Ambrosiance_; and fain would I have seen, for but a