INCREASE OF BAKERS. 315 



Matters became worse and worse. Mo're bakers ap- 

 peared in Thurso, and his trade again diminished. Some 

 of them sold whisky and groceries, besides carrying on 

 the baking business. Whisky was a great competitor ; 

 for Caithness folks are very drouthy. The Eeverend 

 William Smith of Bower, whose members, and even 

 whose elders, were much addicted to the use of spiritu- 

 ous liquors, once addressed his congregation as follows : 

 " My brethren, we are told in the Scriptures that the 

 ciders of old were filled with the Holy Spirit ; but now- 

 a-days, they're filled with John Barleycorn ! " One 

 may guess the wind-up of his sermon. 



Dick was thus very heavily handicapped, as he 

 lived by baking alone. He then thought of carrying 

 on a tea business, and thus adding to his income. But 

 the idea was abandoned. One of the whisky and gro- 

 cery bakers determined to undersell all the bakers in 

 Thurso. He did so, and afterwards became a bank- 

 rupt. But Dick gained nothing from that. In the 

 contest he was nearly ruined. 



"How many bakers, think you," he writes to his 

 sister in 1862, " are now in Thurso ? Six master bakers, 

 and thirteen apprentices ! All doing well, they say ! 

 Who rises earliest ? Dick. Who is the oldest ? Dick. 

 And yet Dick has not made a fortune ! I wish I had 

 left here in 1843, that is, eighteen years ago. There 

 is no use in repining. Yet how manfully I have battled, 

 no one knows. You see, from one of the papers you 

 sent me, that a baker's wife at Alva drowned herself in 

 Devon river, r^nd that a baker at Cupar-in-Fife baa 

 hanged himself. It did not surprise me." 



