Having mentioned these persons of so many different professions by borrowed names, and perhaps in a manner seemingly ludicrous, I would not have my reader from hence take occasion of looking on my account as fabulous. If I was not to make use of borrowed names, but to tell the real characters and names of the persons, I should do injury to those old friends of his who first gave credit to our young seer, while I am endeavouring to gain him the credit and esteem of new ones, in whose way it has not yet happened to consult him. For many persons are very willing to ask such questions as the foregoing ones; but few or none willing to have the public told they asked them; though they succeeded in their wish, and were amply satisfied in their curiosity. I have represented them perhaps in a ludicrous manner, because though they are mysterious actions they are still the actions of a boy, and as the rewards he received for his advices did really and truly consist of such toys as I mentioned, so could they not be treated of in a more serious manner, without the author's incurring a magisterial air of pedantry, and showing a mind, as it were, of being mighty grave and sententious about trifles. There are, however, some things of greater weight and importance done by him in a more advanced stage of life, which will be delivered to the public with that exactitude and gravity which becomes them; and in some of those relations the names of some persons that are concerned shall be printed, because it will not at all be injurious to them, or because I have their leave, and they are still living to testify what I shall relate. In the mean time, as the greatest part of his nonage was spent in predicting almost innumerable things, which are all, however, reducible to the general heads above mentioned, I will not tire the reader with any particulars; but instead of doing that, before I come to show his power of divination, in the more active parts of his life, and when after removing from Edinburgh to London, he at last made it his public profession; I shall account how such divinations may be made, and divert the reader with many rare examples, taken from several faithful and undoubted historians, of persons who have done the like before him, some in one way, and some in another; though in this he seems to be peculiar, and to be, if I may be allowed the expression, a species by himself, alone in the talent of prediction; that he has collected within his own individual capacity all the methods which others severally used, and with which they were differently and singly gifted in their several ways of foreseeing and foretelling.