Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874. Excerpt: ... FTER my uncle's death, I was immediately sent home to my father at Cowhills, and in process of time, I was apprenticed to a weaver. In those days the weaving was a thriving and lucrative trade. My apprentice master, for example, wrought at the loom only four days in the week, and in that time he earned £2, enough then to make him a person of some consideration. On the remaining two days of the week he disported himself with gun and fishing-rod. But this prosperity was not of long duration. My apprentice-master had to give up his gun and his fishing-rod; and wages continuing to decline, he forsook the trade altogether--only, however, as I afterwards heard, to take to the work of a day labourer, doing drudgery work for masons, or breaking stones by the roadside, as occasion might offer. He must, I daresay, have often moralised on the ups and downs of the world, when comparing his later days with his-earlier--the glory of two pounds a-week, with gun and fishingrod, and the misery of a few shillings; and these even hard to earn. During my apprenticeship, misfortunes came thick upon my father. Ruin for a while seemed to have him in the wind. He made bad bargains; his horses and cattle died; and in a little while he was constrained to let Cowhillls at a merely nominal rent and retire once more to Peterhead, where he resumed the shoemaker's stool. Meantime, my own circumstances were far from comfortable, or seemed so to me. Perhaps I was inexcusably foolish in acting as I did; but at anyrate, I got wearied of what I considered the intolerable as well as dishonourable persecution of my apprentice-master; and in the end resolved on running off to enlist. I have never been able to conjecture the object my master had in view; but I know this, that he did all in...
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