ALEXANDER WILSON. 
27 
Being fond of music and dancing, and having been 
invited to a ball for which he was somewhat ill 
suited, the fashionable dress for young men at that 
period consisting of knee-breeches, white silk stock- 
ings, and black /cutifcens, Anglice gaiters. Wilson 
was reduced to his last pair of thread stockings, 
worse for the wear, and impure in the colour ; and 
being altogether deficient of the gaiters, he whitened 
the upper portion of the leg with chalk, and com- 
pleted the deception by painting the nether part in 
imitation of the gaiters; and in this disguise, he 
figured off with his usual lightness of step, without 
being discovered. 
Disappointed and chagrined with a career so very 
unsettled, he sunk into a state of great despondency, 
which brought on an inflammatory attack which 
threatened to fix upon his lungs ; yet, while labour- 
ing under such severe distress both of body and mind, 
he never lost sight of those religious principles which 
appear to have been early implanted by his anxious 
and kind parents, 
“ To lift his thoughts from things l>elow. 
And lead them to divine.” 
We give an extract from a letter written in this 
illness to his friend Mr. Crichton, which describes 
both his feelings and hopes from the consolations of 
religion. “ Driven by poverty and disease to the 
solitudes of retirement, at the same period when 
the flush of youth, the thirst of fame, and the ex- 
pected applause of the world, welcomed me to the 
