David Macbeth Moir was born at Musselburgh, Scotland, Jan. 5, 1798, and educated at the grammar school of the Royal Burgh and at Edinburgh University, from which he received the diploma of surgeon in 1816.  He practised as a physician in his native town from 1817 until 1843, when, health failing, he practically withdrew from the active duties of his profession.  Moir began to write in both prose and verse for various periodicals when quite a youth, but his long connection with “Blackwood’s Magazine” under the pen name of “Delta”, began in 1820, and he became associated with Christopher North, the Ettrick Shepherd, and others of the Edinburgh coterie distinguished in “Noctes Ambrosianae.”  He contributed to “Blackwood,” histories, biographies, essays, and poems, to the number of about 400.  His poems were esteemed beyond their merits by his generation, and his reputation now rests almost solely on the caustic humour of his “Autobiography of Mansie Wauch,” published in 1828, a series of sketches of the manner of life in the shop-keeping and small-trading class of a Scottish provincial town at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Moir died at Dumfries on July 6, 1851.

I.—­Mansie’s Forebears and Early Life

Some of the rich houses and great folk pretend to have histories of the ancientness of their families, which they can count back on their fingers almost to the days of Noah’s Ark, and King Fergus the First, but it is not in my power to come further back than auld grand-faither, who died when I was a growing callant.  I mind him full well.  To look at him was just as if one of the ancient patriarchs had been left on the earth, to let succeeding survivors witness a picture of hoary and venerable eld.

My own father, auld Mansie Wauch, was, at the age of thirteen, bound a ’prentice to the weaver trade, which he prosecuted till a mortal fever cut through the thread of his existence.  Alas, as Job says, “How time flies like a weaver’s shuttle!” He was a decent, industrious, hard-working man, doing everything for the good of his family, and winning the respect of all who knew the value of his worth.  On the five-and-twentieth year of his age he fell in love with, and married, my mother, Marion Laverock.

I have no distinct recollection of the thing myself, but there is every reason to believe that I was born on October 13, 1765, in a little house in the Flesh-Market Gate, Dalkeith, and the first thing I have any clear memory of was being carried on my auntie’s shoulders to see the Fair Race.  Oh! but it was a grand sight!  I have read since the story of Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp, but that fair and the race, which was won by a young birkie who had neither hat nor shoon, riding a philandering beast of a horse thirteen or fourteen years auld, beat it all to sticks.

In time, I was sent to school, where I learned to read and spell, making great progress in the Single and Mother’s Carritch.  What is more, few could fickle me in the Bible, being mostly able to spell it all over, save the second of Ezra and the seventh of Nehemiah, which the Dominie himself could never read through twice in the same way, or without variation.