However, if I get my legacy well settled, I will buy the book, and
lend it to you on my return, please God, to the manse.

We were put on shore at Glasgow by breakfast-time, and there we
tarried all day, as I had a power of attorney to get from Miss Jenny
Macbride, my cousin, to whom the colonel left the thousand pound
legacy. Miss Jenny thought the legacy should have been more, and
made some obstacle to signing the power; but both her lawyer and
Andrew Pringle, my son, convinced her, that, as it was specified in
the testament, she could not help it by standing out; so at long and
last Miss Jenny was persuaded to put her name to the paper.

Next day we all four got into a fly coach, and, without damage or
detriment, reached this city in good time for dinner in Macgregor's
hotel, a remarkable decent inn, next door to one Mr. Blackwood, a
civil and discreet man in the bookselling line.

Really the changes in Edinburgh since I was here, thirty years ago,
are not to be told. I am confounded; for although I have both heard
and read of the New Town in the Edinburgh Advertiser, and the Scots
Magazine, I had no notion of what has come to pass. It's surprising
to think wherein the decay of the nation is; for at Greenock I saw
nothing but shipping and building; at Glasgow, streets spreading as
if they were one of the branches of cotton-spinning; and here, the
houses grown up as if they were sown in the seed-time with the corn,
by a drill-machine, or dibbled in rigs and furrows like beans and
potatoes.

To-morrow, God willing, we embark in a smack at Leith, so that you
will not hear from me again till it please Him to take us in the