Alexander is set at fourteen to throw earth out of a ditch so deep, that it requires the full strength of a grown man, and loses flesh and health under the exertion; he is twice blown up with his own blast in quarrying, and left for dead, recovers slowly, maimed and scarred, with the loss of an eye.  John, when not thirteen, is set to stone-breaking on the roads during intense cold, and has to keep himself from being frostbitten and heart-broken by monkey gambols; takes to the weaving trade, and having helped his family by the most desperate economy to save ten pounds wherewith to buy looms, begins to work them, with his brother as an apprentice, and finds the whole outlay rendered useless the very same year by the failures of 1825- 26.  So the two return to day-labour at fourteenpence a-day.  John, in a struggle to do task-work honestly, over-exerts himself, and ruins his digestion for life.  Next year he is set in November to clean out a watercourse knee-deep in water; then to take marl from a pit; and then to drain standing water off a swamp during an intense December frost; and finds himself laid down with a three months’ cough, and all but sleepless illness, laying the foundation of the consumption which destroyed him.  But the two brothers will not give in.  Poetry they will write; and they write it to the best of their powers, on scraps of paper, after the drudgery of the day, in a cabin pervious to every shower, teaching themselves the right spelling of the words from some “Christian Remembrancer” or other—­apparently not our meek and unbiassed contemporary of that name; and all this without neglecting their work a day or even an hour, when the weather permitted—­the “only thing which tempted them to fret,” being—­hear it, readers, and perpend!—­“the being kept at home by rain and snow.”  Then an additional malady (apparently some calculous one) comes on John, and stops by him for the six remaining years of his life.  Yet between 1826 and 1832, John had saved fourteen pounds out of his miserable earnings, to be expended to the last farthing on his brother’s recovery from the second quarry accident.  Surely the devil is trying hard to spoil these men.  But no.  They are made perfect by sufferings.  In the house with one long narrow room, and a small vacant space at the end of it, lighted by a single pane of glass, they write and write untiring, during the long summer evenings, poetry, “Tales of the Scottish Peasant Life,” which at last bring them in somewhat; and a work on practical economy, which is bepraised and corrected by kind critics in Edinburgh, and at last published—­ without a sale.  Perhaps one cause of its failure might be found in those very corrections.  There were too many violent political allusions in it, complains their good Mentor of Edinburgh; and persuades them, seemingly the most meek and teachable of heroes, to omit them; though Alexander, while submitting, pleads fairly enough for retaining them, in a passage which we will give, as a specimen of the sort of English possible to be acquired by a Scotch day-labourer, self-educated, all but the rudiments of reading and writing, and a few lectures on popular poetry from “a young student of Aberdeen,” now the Rev. Mr. Adamson, who must look back on the friendship which he bore these two young men as one of the noblest pages in his life.