It was remarked that Kenneth acquired more of his profession in the last year of his apprenticeship than in all the others. His skill as a workman came to rank but little below the average ability of his shopmates; and he seemed to enjoy more, and had become less bashful and awkward. His master on one occasion brought him aboard a vessel in the harbour, to repair some injury which her bulwarks had sustained in a storm; and Kenneth, for the first time in his life, was introduced to the mariner’s compass. The master in after days, when his apprentice had become a great man, used to relate the circumstance with much complacency, and compare him, as he bent over the instrument in wonder and admiration, to a negro of the Kanga tribe worshipping the elephant’s tooth. On the close of his apprenticeship he left this part of the country for London, accompanied by his master’s eldest son, a lad of a rather careless disposition, but, like his father, a first-rate workman. Kenneth soon began to experience the straits and hardships of the inferior mechanic. His companion found little difficulty in procuring employment, and none at all in retaining it when once procured. Kenneth, on the contrary, was tossed about from shop to shop, and from one establishment to another; and for a full twelvemonth, during the half of which he was wholly unemployed, he did not work for more than a fortnight together with any one master. It would have fared worse with him than it did, had it not been for his companion, Willie Sandison, who generously shared his earnings with him every time he stood in need of his assistance. In about a year after they had gone to London, however, Willie, an honest and warm-hearted but thoughtless lad, was inveigled into a disreputable marriage, and lost in consequence his wonted ability to assist his companion. I have seen one of Kenneth’s letters to his old master, written about this time, in which he bewails Willie’s mishap, and dwells gloomily on his own prospects. How these first began to brighten I am unable to say, for there occurs about this period a wide gap in his story, which all my inquiries regarding him have not enabled me to fill; but in a second letter to his master, now before me, which bears date 1772, just ten years after the other, there are the evidences of a surprising improvement in his circumstances and condition.