56 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. III. 



very beginning of the flitting \Anglid removal]. You will 

 not wonder that I hesitated little to accompany Mr. 

 Mackay to Glasgow, in which place, and the adjoining 

 towns and the like, I have spent more than two weeks, 

 having returned to town on Friday evening from Lanark, 

 which I made the goal of my journey." 



"Gayfield Square, June i8/, 1838. 



" My only excuse for not writing to you, has been the 

 apparently paradoxical one to you, I am sure almost 

 without meaning and weight of having too little to occupy 

 me ! not that I have been idle, for that I cannot be, but 

 my business has been more of the body than of the mind ; 

 more of the feet than the head. As soon as I came home 

 from Glasgow, I knew I had to begin dispensary duties, 

 and set about finding one. I found the New Town one full. 

 The Old Town Dispensary had the Grassmarket district, 

 which they offered me ; but I felt little inclined to take on 

 me at once the onerous responsibility of so large a district, 

 in which I knew I should be little assisted by superior 

 doctors, but left to blunder rny way on through fevers and 

 wounds and distempers. In an agony of fright, and a 

 delirium of suspense, fearful of committing evil, and by the 

 very fear unnerving my hands and paralysing my energies, 

 in short, ' doomed to wade through slaughter to ' a know- 

 ledge of practice, and bent on learning the profession of 

 a doctor, I articled myself to the Port-Hopetoun Dis- 

 pensary, where, though their list was full, I was taken on as 

 a subsidiary ; the period I serve being sufficient to give me 

 claims to a certificate, so that I learn and get over all 

 difficulties at the same time. The great recommendation, 

 however, is that, instead of being a principal, I am hooked 

 to my good friend John Niven, with whom I every day 



