1 1 6 RISEN B Y PERSE VERANCE. 



After a widowhood of more than thirteen years, his 

 mother married again, and he was forced to begin and 

 work in earnest at some trade; so he determined being 

 a mason. Without objecting to the match, 'you may be 

 certain,' he wrote to a friend some years later, * that it gave 

 me much disgust at the time.' In making this decision, 

 he thought that perhaps Uterature or natural science might 

 be his proper vocation, but at the same time he determined 

 that much of his leisure, in spite of his misspent youth, 

 should be given to the study of the best English authors. 

 His Uncle James would have liked had he chosen some of 

 the learned professions requiring a college training, such as 

 a lawyer or a minister. But as they were all decided 

 that a minister could not be manufactured by a few 

 years' study, they at length consented that he should begin 

 a life of manual labour. He was accordingly apprenticed 

 to the husband of one of his maternal aunts for a term 

 of three years, and he began work in earnest. ' Noble, 

 upright, self-relying Toil ! ' he writes, * who that knows thy 

 solid worth and value would be ashamed of thy hard hands, 

 and thy soiled vestments, and thy obscure tasks — thy humble 

 cottage, and hard couch, and homely fare ! Save for thee and 

 thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad 

 compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this fallen 

 world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness. 

 But I little thought of the excellence of thy character and of 

 thy teachings, when, with a heavy heart, I set out about this 

 time, on a morning of early spring, to take my first lesson from 

 thee in a sandstone quarry.' The work oppressed his growing 

 frame at first, but use gave ease to the young stonemason. 

 How he escaped the vice of ' dram-drinking ' is thus related by 



