UPS AND DOWNS; OR, DAVID STUART'S ACCOUNT OF HIS PILGRIMAGE. (John Mackay Wilson)
THE BURGHER'S TALES. (Alexander Leighton)
LADY RAE. (Alexander Campbell)
THE DIAMOND EYES. (Alexander Leighton)
DAVID LORIMER. (Anon.)
THE CONVICT. (Anon.)
THE AMATEUR ROBBERY. (Alexander Leighton)
THE PROCRASTINATOR. (John Mackay Wilson)
THE TEN OF DIAMONDS. (Alexander Leighton)
Old David Stuart was the picture of health—a personification of contentment. When I knew him, his years must have considerably exceeded threescore; but his good-natured face was as ruddy as health could make it; his hair, though mingled with grey, was as thick and strong as if he had been but twenty; his person was still muscular and active; and, moreover, he yet retained, in all their freshness, the feelings of his youth, and no small portion of the simplicity of his childhood. I loved David, not only because he was a good man, but because there was a great deal of character or originality about him; and though his brow was cheerful, the clouds of sorrow had frequently rested upon it. More than once when seated by his parlour fire, and when he had finished his pipe, and his afternoon tumbler stood on the table beside him, I have heard him give the following account of the ups and downs—the trials, the joys, and sorrows—which he had encountered in his worldly pilgrimage; and, to preserve the interest of the history, I shall give it in David's own idiom, and in his own words.
"I ne'er was a great traveller," David was wont to begin: "through the length o' Edinburgh, and as far south as Newcastle, is a' that my legs ken about geography. But I've had a good deal o' crooks and thraws, and ups and downs, in the world for a' that. My faither was in the droving line, and lived in the parish o' Coldstream. He did a good deal o' business, baith about the fairs on the Borders, at Edinburgh market every week, and sometimes at Morpeth. He was a bachelor till he was five-and-forty, an