I was accompanied to the vessel by my friend William Ross, from whom I, alas! parted for the last time; and, when stepping aboard, Cousin William, whom I had scarce expected to see, but who had snatched an hour from business, and walked down all the way to Leith to bid me farewell, came forward to grasp me by the hand. I am not much disposed to quarrel with the pride of the working man, when according to Johnson and Chalmers, it is a defensive, not an aggressive pride; but it does at times lead him to be somewhat less than just to the better feelings of the men who occupy places in the scale a little higher than his own. Cousin William, from whom I had kept so jealously aloof, had a heart of the finest water. His after course was rough and unprosperous. After the general crash of 1825-26, he struggled on in London for some six or eight years, in circumstances of great difficulty; and then, receiving some surbodinate appointment in connexion with the Stipendiary Magistracy of the West Indies, he sailed for Jamaica--where, considerably turned of fifty at the time--he soon fell a victim to the climate. In my voyage north, I spent about half as many days on sea, between Leith Roads and the Sutors of Cromarty, as the Cunard steamers now spend in crossing the Atlantic. I had taken a cabin passage, not caring to subject my weakened lungs to the exposure of a steerage one; but during the seven days of thick, foggy mornings, clear moonlight nights, and almost unbroken calms, both night and morning, in which we tided our slow way north, I was much in the forecastle with the men, seeing how sailors lived, and ascertaining what they were thinking about, and how. We had rare narratives at nights-- "Wonderful stories of battle and wreck, That were told by the men of the watch."