history of the picked men among the labouring orders, has chosen two or
three lives of such a sort for investigation, and from them we may
select a single one as an example of a working man's career rendered
conspicuous by qualities other than those that usually secure external
success.

Thomas Edward, associate of the Linnean Society, though a Scotchman all
his life long, was accidentally born (so to speak) at Gosport, near
Portsmouth, on Christmas Day, 1814. His father was in the Fifeshire
militia and in those warlike days, when almost all the regulars were on
the Continent, fighting Napoleon, militia regiments used to be ordered
about the country from one place to another, to watch the coast or mount
guard over the French prisoners, in the most unaccountable fashion. So
it happened, oddly enough, that Thomas Edward, a Scotchman of the
Scotch, was born close under the big forts of Portsmouth harbour.

After Waterloo, however, the Fifeshire regiment was sent home again; and
the militia being before long disbanded, John Edward, our hero's father,
went to live at Aberdeen, where he plied his poor trade of a hand-loom
linen weaver for many years. It was on the green at Aberdeen, surrounded
by small labourers' cottages, that Thomas Edward passed his early days.
From his babyhood, almost, the boy had a strong love for all the
beasties he saw everywhere around him; a fondness for birds and animals,
and a habit of taming them which can seldom be acquired, but which seems
with some people to come instinctively by nature. While Tam was still
quite a child, he loved to wander by himself out into the country, along
the green banks of the Dee, or among the tidal islands at the mouth of
the river, overgrown by waving seaweeds, and fringed with great white
bunches of blossoming scurvy-grass. He loved to hunt for crabs and sea-
anemones beside the ebbing channels, or to watch the jelly-fish left