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CAUTIOUS WATTY.
He was the queerest laddie
that ever I had at my school. He had neither talent nor cleverness; but he
made up for both, and I may say more than made up for both, by method and
application. Ye would have said that nature had been in a miserly humour
when it made his brains; but, if it had been niggardly in the quantity, it
certainly had spared no pains in placing them properly. He was the very
reverse o’ Solitary Sandy. I never could get Watty to scan a line or
construe a sentence right in my days. He did not seem to understand the
nature o’ words—or, at least, in so far as applied to sentiment, idea, or
fine writing. Figures were Watty’s alphabet; and, from his earliest years,
pounds, shillings, and pence were the syllables by which he joined them
together. The abstruser points of mathematics were beyond his intellect;
but he seemed to have a liking for the certainty of the
science, and he manifested a wish to master it. My housekeeper that then
was, has informed me, that, when a’ the rest o’ ye wad hae been selling
your copies as waste paper, for taffy, or what some ca’
treacle-candy, Watty would only part wi’ his to the paper purchaser
for money down; and when ony o’ ye took a greenin’ for the sweet things o’
the shopkeeper, without a halfpenny to purchase one, Watty would volunteer
to lend ye the money until a certain day, upon condition that ye would
then pay him a penny for the loan o’ his halfpenny. But he exhibited a
grand trait o’ this disposition when he cam’ to learn the rule o’
Compound Interest. Indeed, I need not say he learned it, for he
literally devoured it. He wrought every question in Dilworth’s Rule
within two days, and, when he had finished it, (for he seldom had his
slate away from my face, and I was half tired wi’ saying to him, ‘That
will do, sir,’) he came up to my desk, and says he, wi’ a face as earnest
as a judge—
‘May I go through this rule
again, sir?’
‘I think ye understand it,
Watty,’ said I, rather significantly.
‘But I would like to be
perfect in it, sir,’ answered he.
‘Then go through it again,
Watty,’ said I ‘and I have nae doubt but ye will be perfect in it
very quickly.’
I said this wi’ a degree o’
irony which I was not then, and which I am not now, in the habit of
exhibiting before my scholars; but from what I had observed and heard o’
him, it betrayed to me a trait in human nature that literally disgusted
me. But I have no pleasure in dwelling upon his history. Shortly after
leaving the school, he was sent up to London to an uncle; and, as his
parents had the means o’ setting him up in the world, he was there to make
a choice o’ a profession.
After looking about the
great city for a time, it was the choice and pleasure o’ Cautious Watty to
be bound as an apprentice to a pawnbroker. He afterwards commenced
business for himself and every day in his life indulging in his favourite
study, Compound Interest, and, as far as he durst, putting it in practice,
he, in a short time, became rich. But, as his substance increased, he did
not confine himself to portable articles, or such things as are usually
taken in pledge by the members of his profession; but he took estates in
pledge, receiving the title-deeds as his security, and in such
cases he did exact his Compound Interest to the last farthing to which he
could stretch it. He neither knew the meaning of generosity nor mercy.
Shakspeare’s beautiful apostrophe to the latter godlike attribute in the
Merchant of Venice, would have been flat nonsense in the
estimation of Watty. He had but one answer to every argument and to every
case, and which he laid to his conscience in all his transactions (if he
had a conscience), and that was—‘A bargain’s a bargain!’ This was his ten
times repeated phrase every day. It was the doctrine by which he swore;
and Shylock would have died wi’ envy, to have seen Watty exacting his
‘pound o’ flesh.’ I have only to tell ye that he has been twice
married. The first time was to a widow four year older than his mother, wi’
whom he got ten thousand. The second time was to a maiden lady who had
been a coquette and flirt in her day, but who, when the deep crow-feet
upon her brow began to reflect sermons from her looking-glass, became a
patroniser of piety and religious institutions. Watty heard o’ her
fortune, and o’ her disposition and habits. He turned an Episcopalion
because she was one. He became a sitter and a regular attender in the same
pew in the church. He began his courtship by opening the pew door to her
when he saw her coming, before the sexton reached it. He next sought her
out the services for the day in the prayer-book—he had it always open and
ready to put in her hand. He dusted the cushion on which she was to sit,
with his handkerchief, as she entered the pew. He, in short, showed her a
hundred little pious attentions. The sensibility of the converted flirt
was affected by them. At length he offered her his arm from the pew to the
hackney coach, or sedan chair which waited for her at the church door; and
eventually, he led her to the altar in the seventy-third year of her age;
when, to use his own words, he married her thirty thousand pounds, and
took the old woman before the minister as a witness. Such, sir, is all I
know concerning Cautious Watty.
"The next o’ your auld
class-mates that I have to notice-(continued Mr. Grierson), is Leein’
Peter. |
