" The maternal maxim sank
deeply into my heart, and I never for a moment have forgotten it.
Notwithstanding this aristocratic resolution, the great practical
question, "How am I to live?" began to thrust itself unpleasantly before
me. I am one of that unfortunate class who have neither uncles nor
aunts. For me, no yellow liverless individual, with characteristic
bamboo and pigtail,--emblems of half a million,--returned to his native
shores from Ceylon or remote Penang. For me, no venerable spinster
hoarded in the Trongate, permitting herself few luxuries during a
long protracted life, save a lass and a lanthorn, a parrot, and the
invariable baudrons of antiquity. No such luck was mine. Had all Glasgow
perished by some vast epidemic, I should not have found myself one
farthing the richer. There would have been no golden balsam for me in
the accumulated woes of Tradestown, Shettleston, and Camlachie. The
time has been when--according to Washington Irving and other veracious
historians--a young man had no sooner got into difficulties than a
guardian angel appeared to him in a dream, with the information that at
such and such a bridge, or under such and such a tree, he might find,
at a slight expenditure of labour, a gallipot secured with bladder,
and filled with glittering tomans; or, in the extremity of despair, the
youth had only to append himself to a cord, and straightway the other
end thereof, forsaking its staple in the roof, would disclose amid the
fractured ceiling the glories of a profitable pose.
Pages:
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127