in a settled way, and when I was bound 'prentice to him, he had
three regular journeymen and a cloth shop. It was therefore not so
much for learning the tailoring, as to get an insight in the
conformity between the traffic of the shop and the board that I was
bound to him, being destined by my parents for the profession
appertaining to the former, and to conjoin thereto something of the
mercery and haberdashery: my uncle, that had been a sutler in the
army along with General Wolfe, who made a conquest of Quebec, having
left me a legacy of three hundred pounds because I was called after
him, the which legacy was a consideration for to set me up in due
season in some genteel business.

Accordingly, as I have narrated, when I had passed a year over my
'prenticeship with Mr Remnant, I took up the corner shop at the
Cross, facing the Tolbooth; and having had it adorned in a befitting
manner, about a month before the summer fair thereafter, I opened it
on that day, with an excellent assortment of goods, the best, both
for taste and variety, that had ever been seen in the burgh of
Gudetown; and the winter following, finding by my books that I was
in a way to do so, I married my wife: she was daughter to Mrs
Broderip, who kept the head inn in Irville, and by whose death, in
the fall of the next year, we got a nest egg, that, without a vain
pretension, I may say we have not failed to lay upon, and clock to
some purpose.

Being thus settled in a shop and in life, I soon found that I had a
part to perform in the public world; but I looked warily about me
before casting my nets, and therefore I laid myself out rather to be
entreated than to ask; for I had often heard Mr Remnant observe,
that the nature of man could not abide to see a neighbour taking