So, after Benjie brought Mungo home again, gey forfaughten and wearied-out like, I bade the wife gave him his four-hours, and told him he might go to his bed as soon as he liked.

Jealousing also, at the same time, that creatures brought up in the country have strange notions about them with respect to supernaturals--such as ghosts, brownies, fairies, and bogles--to say nothing of witches, warlocks, and evil-spirits, I made Benjie take off his clothes and lie down beside him, as I said, to keep him warm; but, in plain matter of fact, (between friends,) that the callant might sleep sounder, finding himself in a strange bed, and not very sure as to how the house stood as to the matter of a good name.
Knowing by my own common sense, and from long experience of the ways of a wicked world, that there is nothing like industry, I went to Mungo's bedside in the morning, and wakened him betimes.

Indeed, I'm leeing there--I need not call it wakening him--for Benjie told me, when he was supping his parritch out of his luggie at breakfast-time, that he never winked an eye all night, and that sometimes he heard him greeting to himself in the dark--such and so powerful is our love of home and the force of natural affection.

Howsoever, as I was saying, I took him ben the house with me down to the workshop, where I had begun to cut out a pair of nankeen trowsers for a young lad that was to be married the week after to a servant-maid of Maister Wiggie's,--a trig quean, that afterwards made him a good wife, and the father of a numerous small family.
Speaking of nankeen, I would advise every one, as a friend, to buy the Indian, and not the British kind--the expense of outlay being ill hained, even at sixpence a-yard--the latter not standing the washing, but making a man's legs, at a distance, look like a yellow yorline.
It behoved me now as a maister, bent on the improvement of his prentice, to commence learning Mungo some few of the mysteries of our trade; so having showed him the way to crock his hough, (example is better than precept, as James Batter observes,) I taught him the plan of holding the needle; and having fitted his middle-finger with a bottomless thimble of our own sort, I set him to sewing the cotton-lining into one leg, knowing that it was a part not very particular, and not very likely to be seen; so that the matter was not great, whether the stitching was exactly regular, or rather in the zigzag line.

As is customary with all new beginners, he made a desperate awkward hand at it, and of which I would of course have said nothing, but that he chanced to brog his thumb, and completely soiled the whole piece of work with the stains of blood; which, for one thing, could not wash out without being seen; and, for another, was an unlucky omen to happen to a marriage garment.
Every man should be on his guard: this was a lesson I learned when I was in the volunteers, at the time Buonaparte was expected to land down at Dunbar.