FAME, PAUPERISM AND WEAKNESS. 40 1 



supplied his own wants, but had always spared not a little 

 for his needy family and their poor connections, which 

 he had for many long years regularly and ungrudgingly 

 bestowed giving to his errant wife, paying for his 

 daughters' board, and helping them after marriage up to 

 recent years. Even in 1867, when he was seventy-three 

 and his earnings were becoming painfully small, he had to 

 bear some expenses connected with the death of his wife's 

 son, Durward. 



His one luxury had been the buying of books. His 

 food had cost very little ; he had never spent money on 

 liquor ; he had been no snuffer, though that habit was very 

 common ; and his extensive wanderings had increased his 

 means instead of lessening them. But books he must have. 

 The money spent on them might perhaps have made him 

 richer in pocket, but it certainly would have rendered him 

 poorer in thought and happiness, if not, with his hidden 

 sorrows, a wreck. Which of us could have the heart to 

 grudge him this one intellectual extravagance, saved, as it 

 undoubtedly was, from stomach and back ? 



After 1 870, when trade became daily duller and strength 

 feebler, and when he had passed his seventy-sixth year, for 

 the first time in his life he began to feel the pressure 

 of actual want the breath of "poortith cauld." He 

 worked all the harder and later, and did without a fire in 

 his workshop even in winter, to save a little ; still trying 

 to make ends meet, with the sturdy, admirable independ- 

 ence that had always characterised him since he began 

 to earn his own bread at ten years of age, more than sixty- 

 six years before. He was too proud, too sensitive, too 

 reticent, and too kindly and tender to others, to tell his 



2 D 



