cruelty even by the fastidious, if it was not that he bore the reputation of mildness approaching to softness. Yet he came to Scotland with this blot on his soul, and it was soon deepened, when, having gone to work as a labourer on the Union Canal, he fell in, at Meddiston, with Helen M'Dougal, a comely, if not good-looking, young widow, then residing there after the death of her husband. It has been always said that this was an affair of love, at least it ended in a connexion so close that they resolved to live together. It would appear that the connexion thus formed having been communicated to his priest, he was admonished, and recommended to return to his wife; and a consequence of his refusal was the ordinary excommunication. Yet he continued to have religious fits, during the continuance of which he avoided the chapel, from the terrors of the anathema. We trace him afterwards, as he returned with his paramour to Edinburgh, where he fell, as the consequence of his continued versatility, into peripatetic pedlery, buying and vending old clothes, skins of animals, human hair, and other small articles and wares. Nor did he stick by this, soon betaking himself to cobbling, for which, in a rude way, he discovered that he had a turn, though he had never been taught the craft; and by purchasing old shoes and boots, to which he applied his art, and getting M'Dougal to hawk them, he contrived to realise fifteen or twenty shillings a-week. At this time he was a lodger in "_The Beggars' Hotel_," kept by the well-known Mikey Culzean,--an establishment which had a famous termination, when, being one day burned to the ground, there came forth, driven by the flames, such a swarm of beggars, halt and blind, that their congregation seemed as difficult to account for as the assemblage of a colony of rats. Among them appeared Burke and M'Dougal; but there were left behind in the fire the library of the cobbler, consisting of Ambrose's "Looking unto Jesus," Boston's "Fourfold State," "The Pilgrim's Progress," and Booth's "Reign of Grace." Once more he became a lodger with Mikey, who took up a new hotel in Brown's Close, Grassmarket.