drunken and careless ways.  When Begg came home from the public-house, much the worse for whisky, he would first beat Tam, and then proceed upstairs to beat his wife.  For three years young Edward lived under this intolerable tyranny, till he could stand it no longer.  At last, Begg beat and ill-treated him so terribly that Tam refused outright to complete his apprenticeship.  Begg was afraid to compel him to do so—­doubtless fearing to expose his ill-usage of the lad.  So Tam went to a new master, a kindly man, with whom he worked in future far more happily.

The boy now began to make himself a little botanical garden in the back yard of his mother’s house—­a piece of waste ground covered with rubbish, such as one often sees behind the poorer class of cottages in towns.  Tam determined to alter all that, so he piled up all the stones into a small rockery, dug up the plot, manured it, and filled it with wild and garden flowers.  The wild flowers, of course, he found in the woods and hedgerows around him; but the cultivated kinds he got in a very ingenious fashion, by visiting all the rubbish heaps of the neighbourhood, on which garden refuse was usually piled.  A good many roots and plants can generally be found in such places, and by digging them up, Tam was soon able to make himself a number of bright and lively beds.  Such self-help in natural history always lay very much in Edward’s way.

At the same time, young Edward was now beginning to feel the desire for knowing something more about the beasts and birds of which he was so fond.  He used to go in all his spare moments among the shops in the town, to look at the pictures in the windows, especially the pictures of animals; and though his earnings were still small, he bought a book whenever he was able to afford one.  In those days, cheap papers for the people were only just beginning to come into existence; and Tam, who was now eighteen, bought the first number of the Penny Magazine, an excellent journal of that time, which he liked so much that he continued to take in the succeeding numbers.  Some of the papers in it were about natural history, and these, of course, particularly delighted the young man’s heart.  He also bought the Weekly Visitor, which he read through over and over again.

In 1831, when Tam was still eighteen, he enlisted in the Aberdeenshire militia, and during his brief period of service an amusing circumstance occurred which well displays the almost irresistible character of Edward’s love of nature.  While he was drilling with the awkward squad one morning, a butterfly of a kind that he had never seen before happened to flit in front of him as he stood in the ranks.  It was a beautiful large brown butterfly, and Edward was so fascinated by its appearance that he entirely forgot, in a moment, where he was and what he was doing.  Without a second’s thought, he darted wildly out of the ranks, and rushed after the butterfly, cap in hand.  It led him a pretty chase, over