While these heart-burnings were at the highest, there flourished in
the city of London an ingenious but whimsical and self opinioned
mechanic, much devoted to abstract studies, David Ramsay by name, who,
whether recommended by his great skill in his profession, as the
courtiers alleged, or, as was murmured among the neighbours, by his
birthplace, in the good town of Dalkeith, near Edinburgh, held in
James's household the post of maker of watches and horologes to his
Majesty. He scorned not, however, to keep open shop within Temple Bar,
a few yards to the eastward of Saint Dunstan's Church.

The shop of a London tradesman at that time, as it may be supposed,
was something very different from those we now see in the same
locality. The goods were exposed to sale in cases, only defended from
the weather by a covering of canvass, and the whole resembled the
stalls and booths now erected for the temporary accommodation of
dealers at a country fair, rather than the established emporium of a
respectable citizen. But most of the shopkeepers of note, and David
Ramsay amongst others, had their booth connected with a small
apartment which opened backward from it, and bore the same resemblance
to the front shop that Robinson Crusoe's cavern did to the tent which
he erected before it.

To this Master Ramsay was often accustomed to retreat to the labour of
his abstruse calculations; for he aimed at improvements and
discoveries in his own art, and sometimes pushed his researches, like
Napier, and other mathematicians of the period, into abstract science.
When thus engaged, he left the outer posts of his commercial
establishment to be maintained by two stout-bodied and strong-voiced
apprentices, who kept up the cry of, "What d'ye lack? what d'ye lack?"