I LEFT my kind friends the Dalrymples, and was soon established at my new University. Having but one season to work there, I was, of course, constrained to fee an extraordinary number of Professors; and, by the time I had done this, and purchased the books which they severally informed me were necessary, I found my originally slender purse very light indeed in my pocket. As for surgical instruments, I was entirely spared that expense, being furnished already with a very complete set by Dr Dalrymple's kindness.

If I was poor, however, I had no objections to living poorly. After attending classes and hospitals from daybreak to sunset, I contented myself, young gentleman, with a dinner and supper in one, of bread and milk—or, perhaps, a mess of potatoes, with salt for their only sauce. When you, in shooting or fishing, happen to enter a peasant's cottage, I have no doubt you think the smell of the potatoe pot is extremely delightful, and consider the meal it furnishes almost as a luxury. But you have never tried the thing fairly, as I did. Depend on it, ‘tis worth a trial, notwithstanding. The experience of that winter has not, I assure you, been thrown away upon me. I despised then, and I despise now, the name of luxury. I never worked half so hard, nor lived half so miserably, and yet, never was my head more clear, my nerves more firmly strung, my bodily condition more strenuously athletic;—and yet, I had come to this all at once from a mansion and table of the most refined order. True, sir; but I had come to it also from a mansion and a table that sheltered and fed me as a domestic hireling. This also is what you never have experienced: I assure you, I used to sit over my own little bare board, in that miserable dungeon in the Auld Vennel of Glasgow, and scrape my kebbock with the feelings of a king, compared to what I had when I was picking and choosing among all the made dishes of the solemn table at Barrmains.