As a picture of an individual _victim_, take the following:—My earliest recollections of Mr Kier refer to his keeping a seed-shop in the New Town of Edinburgh. He was a remarkably smart active man, and could tie up little parcels of seeds with an almost magical degree of dispatch. When engaged in that duty, your eye lost sight of his fingers altogether, as you cease to individualise the spokes of a wheel when it is turned with great rapidity. He was the inventor of a curious tall engine, with a peculiar pair of scissors at top, for cutting fruit off trees. This he sent through Prince’s Street every day with one of his boys, who was instructed every now and then to draw the string, so as to make the scissors close as sharply as possible. The boy would watch his men—broad-skirted men with top-boots—and, gliding in before them, would make the thing play _clip_. “Boy, boy,” the country gentleman would cry, “what’s that?” The boy would explain; the gentleman would be delighted with the idea of cutting down any particular apple he chose out of a thickly laden and unapproachable tree; and, after that, nothing more was required than to give him the card of the shop. Mr Kier, however, was not a man of correct or temperate conduct. He used to indulge even in forenoon potations. Opposite to his shop there was a tavern, to which he was in the habit of sending a boy every day for a tumbler of spirits and water, which the wretch was carefully enjoined to carry under his apron. One day the boy forgot the precaution, and carried the infamous crystal quite exposed in his hand across the open and crowded street. Mr Kier was surveying his progress both in going and returning; and when he observed him coming towards the shop, with so damnatory a proof of his malpractices holden forth to the gaze of the world, he leaped and danced within his shop window like a supplejack in a glass case. The poor boy came in quite innocently, little woting of the crime he had committed, or the reception he was to meet with, when, just as he had deposited the glass upon the counter, a blow from the hand of his master stretched him insensibly in a remote corner of the shop, among a parcel of seed-bags. As no qualities will succeed in business unless perfectly good conduct be among the number, and, above all things, an absence from tippling, Kier soon became a _victim_. After he first took to the _bent_, to use Rob Roy’s phrase, I lost sight of him for two or three years. At length I one day met him on a road a little way out of town. He wore a coat buttoned to the chin, and which, being also very long in the breast, according to a fashion which obtained about the year 1813, seemed to enclose his whole trunk from neck to groin. With the usual cataract of cravat, he wore a hat the most woe-begone, the most dejected, the most melancholy I had ever seen. His face was inflamed and agitated, and as he walked, he swung out his arms with a strange emphatic expression, as if he were