The Ayrshire Legatees

Thus, in less time than I have been in writing it, were we put in

possession of all the information we required, and found those whom we

feared might be interested to withhold the settlement, alert and prompt

to assist us.

Mr. Charles Argent is naturally more familiar than his father. He has a

little dash of pleasantry in his manner, with a shrewd good-humoured

fashionable air, that renders him soon an agreeable acquaintance. He

entered with singular felicity at once into the character of the Doctor

and my mother, and waggishly drolled, as if he did not understand them,

in order, I could perceive, to draw out the simplicity of their

apprehensions. He quite won the old lady's economical heart, by offering

to frank her letters, for he is in Parliament. "You have probably," said

he slyly, "friends in the country, to whom you may be desirous of

communicating the result of your journey to London; send your letters to

me, and I will forward them, and any that you expect may also come under

cover to my address, for postage is very expensive."

As we were taking our leave, after being fully instructed in all the

preliminary steps to be taken before the transfers of the funded property

can be made, he asked me, in a friendly manner, to dine with him this

evening, and I never accepted an invitation with more pleasure. I

consider his acquaintance a most agreeable acquisition, and not one of

the least of those advantages which this new opulence has put it in my

power to attain. The incidents, indeed, of this day, have been all

highly gratifying, and the new and brighter phase in which I have seen

the mercantile character, as it is connected with the greatness and glory

of my country--is in itself equivalent to an accession of useful

knowledge. I can no longer wonder at the vast power which the British

Government wielded during the late war, when I reflect that the method

and promptitude of the house of Messrs. Argent and Company is common to

all the great commercial concerns from which the statesmen derived, as

from so many reservoirs, those immense pecuniary supplies, which enabled

them to beggar all the resources of a political despotism, the most

unbounded, both in power and principle, of any tyranny that ever existed

so long.--Yours, etc., ANDREW PRINGLE.