At the moment that Mrs Monilaws and her husband were engaged talking about this strange individual and his daughter, Carey Cuthbert--the third son of William Cuthbert of Cuthbert's, or, as it was called, Cubbertscroft, a fine property in the neighbourhood--entered the shop, with a message from Mrs Cuthbert, for articles for the use of the family, and a request to know if any suitable servant had yet been procured by Mrs Monilaws. This young man, who was about eighteen years of age, was reputed by his parents as unfit for sustaining, even so far as a third son might sustain, the honour and respectability of the Cuthberts of Cubbertscroft. He was represented as being so dull that he would learn nothing; and, at the same time, so fond of associating with inferior people, that he could scarcely have been recognised, either from his conversation or manners, as the son of a gentleman. His bluntness, kindness, and humility, however, pleased all those with whom his father did not wish him to associate. With many of the humble inhabitants of Newabbey he was on the most familiar footing; and nothing pleased him better than to get into the village, where, on every side, he could find companions of the grade that suited his (as his father termed it) depraved taste. In these humbler societies, however, Carey learned what perhaps he would not have done from the Greek and Latin books which, at school, were eternally in his hands, and never in his head. Like most other individuals, whether fools or wits, he had a genius of his own; and, as the worms on which the mole feeds are larger and fatter than the flying insects that form the food of the swallow, humility, and a taste for the common sense that, like water, is best and purest the farther down you go, may be vindicated on the grand principle of utility and interest. We do not give a young man of eighteen credit for an _a priori_ knowledge that his interests lay in searching among the humble for that "lear" that could not be got among the sons of the great; but we may safely assert that nature had placed in him an instinctive liking for the simple and the natural, and he might soon perceive, without any spirit of divination, that, by following nature as his guide, he might arrive at a more satisfactory termination of his journey, than his horse-racing brothers, William and George, who were fast flying through their father's estate. He had nearly already, however, been given up as untractable; his speech, as his mother said, had been Scotch from the first lisp; his ideas had been of the earth, from the first moment he crawled upon it; and the servants his companions, from the time he was able to escape, by the aid of his own feet, from the nursery.