Sandy’s master was what is termed a clever man of business; one of those smart fellows who want only honesty, and that soundness of judgment which seems its natural accompaniment to make headway in the world. He had already threaded his way through the difficulties of three highly respectable failures; he had thrice paid his debts at the rate of fifteen shillings per pound, and had thus realized on each occasion a profit of twenty-five per cent. on the whole. And yet, from some inexplicable cause, he was not making more money than traders much less fertile in expedient than himself. His ordinary gains were perhaps the less considerable from the circumstance, that men came to deal with him as completely on their guard as if they had come to fight with him; and, though a match for any single individual, he was, somehow, no match for every body, even though, after the manner of Captain Bobadil’s opponents, they came only one at a time. His scheme, too, of occasionally suspending his payments, had this disadvantage, that the oftener it was resorted to, the risk became greater and the gain less. The shop of such a person could not be other than a rare school of ingenuity--a place of shifts and expedients--and where, according to the favourite phrase of its master, things were done in a business-like manner; and Sandy Rose was no very backward pupil. There are ingenious young men who are a great deal too apt to confound the idea of talent itself with the knavish exercise of it; and who, seeing nothing very knowing in simple honesty, exert their ingenuity in the opposite tract, rather out of a desire of doing clever things than from any very decided bias to knavery. And Sandy Rose was unfortunately one of the number. It is undoubtedly an ingenious thing to get possession of a neighbour’s money without running the risk of stealing it; and there can be no question that it requires more of talent to overreach another than to be overreached one’s-self. The three years of Sandy’s apprenticeship came to their close, and with the assistance of his father, who in a long course of patient industry had succeeded in saving a few hundred pounds, he opened shop for himself in one of the principal streets of the town.