It would be wearisome to descant at any greater length on my weakliness, or of how the neighbours lamented that such a spunk o’ geni, as they spoke of me in their cracks, should remain an object for life. Some proposed one kind of infallible, and some another; and the minister's wife was every summer vehement in her prescriptions of the salt water at Fisherraw. But season after season came and passed;—the bud biggent and the blossom bloomed; the summer-nymph, with her growan een, walked away in the sunshine of the mountains; blithesome harvest laid down her apronful of sheaves at the barn-door; and the gaberloony winter arose from the chumly-lug, and hirpled o’er the hill;—but still no change came to me.

At last, one morning, a gang of tinklers, with smiddy bellows, and other implements for making horn-spoons, came to town; and there was among them a decent, gausy, conversible carlin, that could turn coats and shape gumashins, for which faculty she was feed to do a day's darg in my father's house. In this, which came out of a necessity on his part, there was a visible manifestation of Providence towards me. For Lucky A’things, as she was called, happened to cast a pitiful eye on me, as I was sitting by the fire-side, making a whistle of a willow-wand, and she began to discourse with my father concerning my complaints.

Well may I remember what she said, for she spoke with great rationality, and in a manner that was more like a graduate than a granny. I had not, indeed, until that time, heard or seen any sort of womankind possessed of such insight. Among the old women of the clachen, there were not wanting two or three who had gleaned in their time a few ears of experience.

Mrs. Musket, the widow of a serjeant who was slain at her side in the battle of Minden, was one of those, and it was allowed that her skill in bruises, visible hurts, and the cutted fingers of the shearers, would have made the fortune of an Edinbro’ doctor.