After getting ourselves again decently mounted, and giving Sparrible a consideration for his trouble, Peter took occasion, from the horse casting its shoe, to make a few apropos moral observations, in the manner
of the Rev. Mr Wiggie, on the uncertainties which it is every man’s lot to encounter in the weariful pilgrimage of human life. “There is many a slip ’tween the cup and the lip,” said Peter.
“And, indeed, Mr Farrel, ye never spoke a truer word,” said I. “We are here to-day—yonder to-morrow; this moment we are shining like the mid-day sun, and on the next, pugh! we go out like the snuff of a candle. ‘Man’s life,’ as Job observes, ‘is like a weaver’s shuttle.’”
“But, Maister Waugh,” quo’ Peter, who was a hearer of the Parish Church, “you dissenting bodies aye take the black side of things; never considering that the doubtful shadows of affairs sometimes brighten up into the cloudless daylight. For instance, now, there was an old fellow-apprentice of my father’s, who, like myself, was a baker, his name was Charlie Cheeper; and, both his father and mother dying when he was yet hardly in trowsers, he would have been left without a hame in the world, had not an old widow woman, who had long lived next door to them, and whose only breadwinner was her spinning-wheel, taken the wee wretchie in to share her morsel. For several years, as might naturally have been expected, the callant was a perfect dead-weight on the concern, and perhaps, in her hours of greater distress, the widow regretted the heedlessness of her Christian charity; but Charlie had a winning way with him, and she could not find
it in her heart to turn him to the door. By the time he was seven—and a ragged coute he was as ever stepped without shoes—he could fend for himself, by running messages—holding horses at shop doors—winning bools and selling them—and so on; so that when he had collected half-a-crown in a penny pig, the widow sent him to the school, where he got on like a hatter, and in a little while, could both read and write. When he was ten, he was bound apprentice to Saunders Snaps in the Back-row, whose grandson has yet, as you know, the sign of the Wheat Sheaf; and for five years he behaved himself like his betters.
“Well, sir, when his time was out, Charlie had an ambition to see the world; and, by working for a month or two as journeyman in the Candlemaker-row at Edinburgh, he raked as much together as took him up to London in the steerage of a Leith smack. For several years nothing was heard of him, except an occasional present of a shawl, or so on, to the widow, who had been so kind to him in his helpless years; and at length a farewell present of some little money came to her, with his blessing for past favours, saying that he was off for good and all to America.
“In the course of time, Widow Amos became frail and sand-blind. She was unable to work for herself, and the charity she had shown to others no one seemed disposed to extend to her. Her only child, Jeanie Amos, was obliged to leave her service, and come home
to the house of poverty, to guard her mother’s grey hairs from accident, and to divide with her the little she could make at the trade of mangling; for, with the money that Charlie Cheeper had sent, before leaving the country, the old woman had bought a calender, and let it out to the neighbours at so much an hour; honest poverty having many shifts.
“Matters had gone on in this way for two or three fitful years; and Jeanie, who, when she had come home from service, was a buxom and blooming lass, although yet but a wee advanced in her thirties, began to show, like all earthly things, that she was wearing past her best. Some said that she had lost hopes of Charlie’s return; and others, that, come hame when he liked, he would never look over his left shoulder after her.
“Well, sir, as fact as death, I mind mysell, when a laddie, of the rumpus the thing made in the town. One Saturday night, a whole washing of old Mrs Pernickity’s that had been sent to be calendered, vanished like lightning, no one knew where: the old lady was neither to hold nor bind: and nothing would serve her, but having both the old woman and her daughter committed to the Tolbooth. So to the Tolbooth they went, weeping and wailing; followed by a crowd, who cried loudly out at the sin and iniquity of the proceeding; because the honesty of the prisoners, although impeached, was unimpeachable; the