He had lost both his parents when an infant; all his other nearer kindred were also dead: and so he was dependent in his earlier years for a precarious subsistence on the charity of a few distant relatives, not a great deal richer than himself. Among the rest there was a poor widow, a namesake of his own, who earned a scanty subsistence by her wheel, but who had heart enough to impart a portion of her little to the destitute scholar. The boy was studious and thoughtful, and surpassed in his tasks most of his schoolfellows; and after passing with singular rapidity through the course pursued at school, he succeeded in putting himself to college. The struggle was arduous and protracted; sometimes he wrought as a common labourer, sometimes he taught an adventure school; he deemed no honest employment too mean or too laborious that forwarded his scheme; and thus he at length passed through the University course. His town’s-people then lost sight of him for nearly twenty years. It was understood, meanwhile, that some nameless friend in the south had settled a small annuity on poor old Widow Hossack; and that a Cromarty sailor, who had been attacked by a dangerous illness when at London, had owed his life to the gratuitous attentions of a famous physician of the place, who had recognised him as a town’s-man. No one, however, thought of the poor scholar; and it was not until his carriage drove up one day through the main street of the town, and stopped at the door of his schoolfellow, William Forsyth, that he was identified with “the great Doctor” who had attended the seaman, and the benefactor of the poor widow. On entering the cottage of the latter, he found her preparing gruel for supper, and was asked, with the anxiety of a gratitude that would fain have rendered him some return, “O Sir! will ye no tak’ _brochan_?” He is said to have been a truly excellent and benevolent man--the Abercromby of a former age; and the ingenious and pious Moses Browne (a clergyman who, to the disgrace of the English Church, was suffered to languish through life in a curacy of fifty pounds per annum) thus addresses him in one of his larger poems, written immediately after the recovery of the author from a long and dangerous illness:-- “The God I trust with timeliest kind relief Sent the beloved physician to my aid, (Generous, humanest, affable of soul, Thee, dearest Hossack;--Oh! long known, long loved, Long proved; in oft found tenderest watching cares, The Christian friend, the man of feeling heart;) And in his skilful, heaven-directed hand, Put his best pleasing, _only_ fee, my cure.” SUNDAY THOUGHTS, Part iv. [Sidenote: THE HARD DOMINIE.]