CHAPTER XXVIII .-- SERIOUS MUSINGS.
My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirr'd, For the same sound is in mine ears, Which in those days I heard.
Thus fares it still in our decay; And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away, Than what it leaves behind.
WORDSWORTH.
After consultation with friends, and much serious consideration on such a momentous subject, it having been finally settled on between the wife and myself to educate Benjie to the barber and haircutting line, we looked round about us in the world for a suitable master to whom we might entrust our dear laddie, he having now finished his education, and reached his fourteenth year.
It was visible in a twinkling to us both, that his apprenticeship could not be gone through with at home in that first-rate style which would enable him to reach the top of the tree in his profession; yet it gave us a sore heart to think of sending away, at so tender an age, one who was so dear to his mother and me, and whom we had, as it were, in a manner made a pet of; so we reckoned it best to article him for a twelvemonth with Ebenezer Packwood at the corner, before finally sending him off to Edinburgh, to get his finishing in the wig, false-curl, and hair-baking department, under Urquhart, Maclachlan, or Connal.

Accordingly, I sent for Eben to come and eat an egg with me--matters were entered upon and arranged--Benjie was sent on trial; and though at first he funked and fought refractory, he came, to the astonishment of his master and the old apprentice, in less than no time to cut hair without many visible shear- marks; and, within the first quarter, succeeded, without so much as drawing blood, to unbristle, for a wager of his master's, the Saturday night's countenance of Daniel Shoebrush himself, who was as rough as a badger.
Having thus done for Benjie, it now behoved me to have an eye towards myself; for, having turned the corner of manhood, I found that I was beginning to be wearing away down the hillside of life.

Customers, who had as much faith in me as almost in their Bible with regard to every thing connected with my own department, and who could depend on their cloth being cut according to the newest and most approved fashions, began now and then to return a coat upon my hand for alteration, as being quite out of date; while my daily work, to which in the days of other years I had got up blithe as the lark, instead of being a pleasure, came to be looked forward to with trouble and anxiety, weighing on my heart as a care, and on my shoulders as a burden.
Finding but too severely that such was the case, and that there is no contending with the course of nature, I took sweet counsel together with James Batter over a cup of tea and a cookie, concerning what it was best for a man placed in my circumstances to betake myself to.
As industry ever has its own reward, let me without brag or boasting be allowed to state, that, in my own case, it did not disappoint my exertions.

I had sat down a tenant, and I was now not only the landlord of my own house and shop, but of all the back tenements to the head of the garden, as also of the row of one-story houses behind, facing to the loan, in the centre of which Lucky Thamson keeps up the sign of the Tankard and Tappit Hen.

It was also a relief to my mind, as the head of my family, that we had cut Benjie loose from his mother's apron-string, poor fellow, and set him adrift in an honest way of doing to buffet the stormy ocean of life; so, every thing considered, it was found that enough and to spare had been laid past by Nanse and me to spend the evening of our days by the lound dykeside of domestic comfort.
In Tammie Bodkin, to whom I trust I had been a dutiful, as I know I was an honoured master, I found a faithful journeyman, he having served me in that capacity for nine years; so, it is not miraculous, being constantly, during that period, under my attentive eye, that he was now quite a deacon in all the departments of the business.