I shall here follow out a portion of his history, in a conversation which he had with a Cumberland farmer, one Peter Liddell, whom he met in London about three years after he had left his country practice on the Borders:—
"The longer I remained in——," said he, "my situation became the more painful. I felt I was becoming something less than the equal of society I despised. I found that I had gradually sunk into the odious vice of drunkenness; that I was the companion only of the ignorant and the worthless; and poverty, eternal poverty and obscurity, were all that appeared before me. But the dormant ambition of boyhood, the dreams that delighted my early years, did not wholly forsake me. I had long determined to leave the village, and try my fortune in the world; but want of means prevented me. I resolved to tear adversity by the beard, and face every obstacle. With difficulty I gathered in as many debts as enabled me to proceed to Newcastle, and take a passage to London, where I arrived on the first of February, without friends, and almost without money—in fact, with not five shillings in my pocket."
"Poor fellow!" said Peter; and they were sitting together in a tavern in Fleet Street, which is called a north-country house; for Peter was in London on business, and having met the doctor on the street, they went into the tavern to talk of their native hills, and the "old familiar faces." "Poor fellow!" added Peter; and, with a sort of sigh, added, "Ah, sirs! it is really well said that the one half of the world doesn't know how the other lives. It would take planning to lay out those five shillings."
"It certainly did," said the scholar. "You are aware that my practice in the village, from a prejudice against what some called my religion, or rather my no religion, was exceedingly limited. In fact, I was a persecuted man, for principles of which I was as ignorant as themselves; and disdaining to accommodate my habits and conversation to their rules, the persecution increased, and the payments made to me became more limited than my practice. I bade fair to become an actual representative of Shakspere's apothecary; and would assuredly have thought myself 'passing rich with forty pounds a-year.' But the one-half of my practice would not pay the expense of wrapping the powders in paper. On sending to our village tobacconist's, I have had my own accounts returning as snuff-paper; and, though my success was not, I believe, inferior to most in the profession, my patients regarded paying me as throwing money away, or as an unnecessary charity; and never did the payments, taking one year with another, exceed thirty pounds."
"Poor fellow! do ye really say so?" responded Peter; "thirty pounds a-year!—and was that a'? And was ye really not an atheist or a deist, doctor, as the people gied ye out to be?"
"Whatever I and the mass of mankind are in our practice, Mr Liddell," he replied, "I am neither, when the small still voice of conscience speaks."
"Gie's your hand—gie's your hand, doctor," cried Peter; "I ask your pardon for onything I ever thought or said respecting ye, as sincerely as ever man did. Conscience is, as ye say, a sma still voice; but I doubt it is one that many will hear aboon the sough o' friends at a death-bed, the thunders o' the day o' judgment, and the roaring and raging o' the bottomless pit. But ye say that ye had barely five shillings in your pocket when ye arrived in London here. How, in a' the world, did ye manage to lay it out?'
"Sixpence," replied the scholar, "went in treating the captain to a glass of grog, when we came on shore, including one for myself."
"That was very foolishly spent, however," interrupted Peter.
"And it being night when we landed," added the doctor, "another shilling was spent in the public-house for a bed."