4/4 JOHN DUNCAN, WEAVER AND BOTANIST. 



and daily self-denial in expenditure, that he placed, and 

 couldn't but place, an inordinate value on even a fe\v 

 shillings. He once told James Black of " a great loss " he 

 had sustained during a harvest in the Lothians, when a 

 rascal borrowed from him and decamped. " How much 

 was it ? " inquired James. " A lot, a great lot o' money," 

 he replied. Being curious to find out how much it really 

 was, but knowing John's wonderful reticence, he bluntly 

 asked him to state the exact amount. " Nearly a paper 

 note," warily returned John. " Perhaps fifteen shillings ? " 

 suggested his friend. "Oo, a lot mair than that," he 

 earnestly replied. " Seventeen and six ? " " Ay," said 

 John, impressively and sadly, as if again realising the pain 

 of the theft ; " ay, ilka bawbee o't ! Think o' that ! " And 

 James did think of it, and with surprise and pain, as he 

 says, and to this day still recalls it, for it was an incidental 

 but striking revelation of his poverty. 



Yet, dear as money thus become to him and may 

 none of us ever know the dire need that forced in poor 

 John such natural but excessive estimate he could not 

 hoard it, as some natures would have done in the circum- 

 stances, or gather it to increase his comfort, or invest it in 

 a house and holding of his own, as some of his friends did. 

 Like them, he did invest his savings, but in something very 

 different in what was dearer to him than all other posses- 

 sions, in his one dissipation, the tools of his intellectual 

 trade, in books ! This sheds a strong side light on the 

 value he put on books, on the strength of his intellectual 

 appetite, and on the pure necessity mental food was to him. 

 As he said at our last interview, " I cu'dna keep frae buyin' 

 buiks." It also increases our astonishment, shared by his 



