Owen had a small share, as I believe is usual, in the house to which he acted as head-clerk, and was therefore personally liable for all its obligations. This was known to Messrs. MacVittie and MacFin; and, with a view of making him feel their power, or rather in order to force him, at this emergency, into those measures in their favour, to which he had expressed himself so repugnant, they had recourse to a summary process of arrest and imprisonment,--which it seems the law of Scotland (therein surely liable to much abuse) allows to a creditor, who finds his conscience at liberty to make oath that the debtor meditates departing from the realm. Under such a warrant had poor Owen been confined to durance on the day preceding that when I was so strangely guided to his prison-house. Thus possessed of the alarming outline of facts, the question remained, what was to be done and it was not of easy determination. I plainly perceived the perils with which we were surrounded, but it was more difficult to suggest any remedy. The warning which I had already received seemed to intimate, that my own personal liberty might be endangered by an open appearance in Owen's behalf. Owen entertained the same apprehension, and, in the exaggeration of his terror, assured me that a Scotchman, rather than run the risk of losing a farthing by an Englishman, would find law for arresting his wife, children, man-servant, maidservant, and stranger within his household. The laws concerning debt, in most countries, are so unmercifully severe, that I could not altogether disbelieve his statement; and my arrest, in the present circumstances, would have been a _coup-de-grace_ to my father's affairs. In this dilemma, I asked Owen if he had not thought of having recourse to my father's other correspondent in Glasgow, Mr. Nicol Jarvie? "He had sent him a letter," he replied, "that morning; but if the smooth-tongued and civil house in the Gallowgate* had used him thus, what was to be expected from the cross-grained crab-stock in the Salt-Market? * [A street in the old town of Glasgow.] You might as well ask a broker to give up his percentage, as expect a favour from him without the _per contra._ He had not even," Owen said, "answered his letter though it was put into his hand that morning as he went to church." And here the despairing man-of-figures threw himself down on his pallet, exclaiming,--"My poor dear master! My poor dear master! O Mr. Frank, Mr. Frank, this is all your obstinacy!--But God forgive me for saying so to you in your distress! It's God's disposing, and man must submit." My philosophy, Tresham, could not prevent my sharing in the honest creature's distress, and we mingled our tears,--the more bitter on my part, as the perverse opposition to my father's will, with which the kind-hearted Owen forbore to upbraid me, rose up to my conscience as the cause of all this affliction.