The worthy we have thus mentioned favourably--because we admire a supporter of the rights of free trade--had laboured for a period of six or eight years in disposing of articles of hosiery, for every one of which he paid a high price; and, whether it was that he could not buy to advantage--his genius, probably, not lying in that way--or that he could not sell with a profit, wherein he displayed the same want of natural tact--it is certain that he became a bankrupt about as soon as other people merely begin to see they might make "a good thing" of a stop. So he wound up cleverly, and made just as little of his bankruptcy--a matter of profit often to those who are mere bunglers in the department of solvency--and took it into his head to sell himself. So, accordingly, as chance would have it, he threw his eyes on Miss Belinda Yellowlees, who combined the two comely properties of wealth and weakness--in other words, she possessed a thousand pounds, and a very bad constitution; and here it was that Caleb's properties began to be manifested; for the man who thought himself not worth one farthing--and was, in fact, not worth more, in the estimation of any of his own sex--was proved to be worth no less than a thousand pounds, at which price Miss Yellowlees bought him, and thought, too, that she had got a very good bargain. Seldom, indeed, it happens that both buyer and seller, in a transaction of pure business concerns, think that they have made a hit; yet, of a surety, it was the case in this marriage; for Mr Caleb Crabbin actually conceived that he had made as good a bargain as did Miss Belinda Yellowlees; and so, to be sure, it was soon proved, by an exceeding good probatory test; for Miss Belinda, within six months, went the way of the dead, and her thousand pounds went the way of the living--that is, into the possession of her surviving husband.