live upon but his half-pay; for, to the disgust of his family, he
had married a Welsh girl of ancient descent, in whose line the
poverty must have been at least coeval with the history, to judge
from the perfection of its development in the case of her father;
and his relations made this the excuse for quarrelling with him; so
relieving themselves from any obligations they might have been
supposed to lie under, of rendering him assistance of some sort or
other. This, however, rather suited the temperament of Major Robert
Sutherland, who was prouder in his poverty than they in their
riches. So he disowned them for ever, and accommodated himself,
with the best grace in the world, to his yet more straitened
circumstances. He resolved, however, cost what it might in pinching
and squeezing, to send his son to college before turning him out to
shift for himself. In this Mrs. Sutherland was ready to support him
to the utmost; and so they had managed to keep their boy at college
for three sessions; after the last of which, instead of returning
home, as he had done on previous occasions, he had looked about him
for a temporary engagement as tutor, and soon found the situation he
now occupied in the family of William Glasford, Esq., of
Turriepuffit, where he intended to remain no longer than the
commencement of the session, which would be his fourth and last. To
what he should afterwards devote himself he had by no means made up
his mind, except that it must of necessity be hard work of some kind
or other. So he had at least the virtue of desiring to be
independent. His other goods and bads must come out in the course
of the story. His pupils were rather stupid and rather
good-natured; so that their temperament operated to confirm their
intellectual condition, and to render the labour of teaching them
considerably irksome. But he did his work tolerably well, and was
not so much interested in the result as to be pained at the moderate