478 JOHN DUNCAN, WEAVER AND BOTANIST. 



He was honest to the very core, and no pain was 

 greater to him than that of getting into debt. In spite 

 of his small wages from an increasingly poor and decaying 

 trade, he owed no man anything till he was compelled in 

 his destitution to fall on the parish. So sterlingly upright 

 was he in all things, that, as Mr. Brewster, the secretary 

 of the Auchleven Society, put it, " he was above, far and 

 away above, even using any other person's information 

 without full acknowledgment." At my last visit to John, 

 in speaking on the subject and of a case in which he had 

 suffered by its violation, he exclaimed, " O honesty, 

 honesty ! I do like honesty ! " 



His orderliness in all he did would have made him 

 be counted a martinet by most. This was apparent in 

 the neatness with which he kept his property in the con- 

 fined space where he lived. In all his transactions in trade, 

 he cultivated thorough business habits, regularly keeping a 

 ledger and rendering accounts for everything he weaved 

 a proceeding uncommon and quite unnecessary in the work 

 of a country weaver. 



His tidiness in person and dress and his care in the 

 preservation of his possessions were something quite re- 

 markable, as has already been seen in the way he brushed 

 and folded his clothes. The fact that he possessed and 

 used the same suits for fifty years, and preserved them 

 presentable to the end, requires no comment. His desire to 

 keep his dress from possible harm reached the eccentric : as 

 when he walked almost constantly with turned-up trousers, 

 even in the critical city ; and when, on entering a carpeted 

 room, he always dusted even a drawing-room chair with 

 his napkin and blew off any possible remaining dust, 



