the slightest, and when he became tall enough for the plough, he made a dead stand. He would go and be a tradesman, he said--a mason, or smith, or house-carpenter--anything his friends chose to make him; but a farmer he would not be. His father, after a fruitless struggle to overcome his obstinacy, carried him with him to a friend in Cromarty, our old acquaintance, Donald Sandison, and after candidly confessing that he was of no manner of use at home, and would, he was afraid, be of little use anywhere, bound him by indenture to the mechanic for four years. Kenneth’s new master, as I have already had occasion to state, was one of the best workmen in his profession in the north of Scotland. His scrutoires and wardrobes were in repute up to the close of the last century, and in the ancient art of wainscot-carving he had no equal in the country. He was an intelligent man too, as well as a superior mechanic; but with all his general intelligence, and all his skill, he failed to discover the latent capabilities of his apprentice. Kenneth was dull and absent, and had no heart to his work; and though he seemed to understand the principles on which his master’s various tools were used and the articles of his trade constructed, as well as any workman in the shop, there were none among them who used the tools so awkwardly, or constructed the articles so ill. An old botching carpenter who wrought in a little shop at the other end of the town, was known to the boys of the place by the humorous appellation of “Spull (_i.e._ spoil)-the-wood,” and a lean-sided, ill-conditioned, dangerous boat which he had built, as “the Wilful Murder.” Kenneth came to be regarded as a sort of second “Spull-the-Wood,” as a fashioner of rickety tables, ill-fitted drawers, and chairs that, when sat upon, creaked like badly-tuned organs; and the boys, who were beginning to regard him as fair game, sometimes took the liberty of asking him whether he, too, was not going to build a Wilful Murder? Such, in short, were his deficiencies as a mechanic, that in the third year of his apprenticeship his master advised his father to take him home with him and set him to the plough--an advice, however, on which the farmer, warned by his previous experience, sturdily refused to act.