"Ye've heard, gudewife, from Benjie's own mouth, that he has made up his mind to follow out the trade of a gentleman;--who has put such outrageous notions in his head I'm sure I'll not pretend to guess at. Having never myself been above daily bread, and constant work--when I could get it--I dare not presume to speak from experience; but this I can say, from having some acquaintances in the line, that, of all easy lives, commend me to that of a gentleman's gentleman. It's true he's caa'd a flunky, which does not sound quite the thing; but what of that? what's in a name? pugh! it does not signify a bawbee--no, nor that pinch of snuff: for, if we descend to particulars, we're all flunkies together, except his Majesty on the throne.--Then William Pitt is his flunky--and half the house of Commons are his flunkies, doing what he bids them, right or wrong, and no daring to disobey orders, not for the hair in their heads--then the Earl waits on my Lord Duke--Sir Something waits on my Lord Somebody--and his tenant, Mr So-and-so, waits on him--and Mr So-and- so has his butler--and the butler has his flunky--and the shoeblack brushes the flunky's jacket--and so on. We all hang at one another's tails like a rope of ingans--so ye observe, that any such objection in the sight of a philosopher like our Benjie, would not weigh a straw's weight. "Then consider, for a moment--just consider, gudewife--what company a flunky is every day taken up with, standing behind the chairs, and helping to clean plates and porter; and the manners he cannot help learning, if he is in the smallest gleg in the uptake, so that, when out of livery, it is the toss up of a halfpenny whether ye find out the difference between the man and the master. He learns, in fact, every thing. He learns French--he learns dancing in all its branches--he learns how to give boots the finishing polish--he learns how to play at cards, as if he had been born and bred an Earl--he learns, from pouring the bottles, the names of every wine brewed abroad--he learns how to brush a coat, so that, after six months' tear and wear, one without spectacles would imagine it had only gotten the finishing stitch on the Saturday night before; and he learns to play on the flute, and the spinnet, and the piano, and the fiddle, and the bagpipes; and to sing all manner of songs, and to skirl, full gallop, with such a pith and birr, that though he was to lose his precious eyesight with the small-pox, or a flash of forked lightning, or fall down a three-story stair dead drunk, smash his legs to such a degree that both of them required to be cut off, above the knees, half an hour after, so far all right and well--for he could just tear off his shoulder-knot, and make a perfect fortune--in the one case, in being led from door to door by a ragged laddie, with a string at the button-hole, playing 'Ower the Border,' 'The Hen's March,' 'Donald M'Donald,' 'Jenny Nettles,' and such like grand tunes, on the