第310页 / 共2651页

The produce of such labour comes frequently cheaper to market

than would otherwise be suitable to its nature. Stockings, in

many parts of Scotland, are knit much cheaper than they can

anywhere be wrought upon the loom. They are the work of servants

and labourers who derive the principal part of their subsistence

from some other employment. More than a thousand pair of Shetland

stockings are annually imported into Leith, of which the price is

from fivepence to seven-pence a pair. At Lerwick, the small

capital of the Shetland islands, tenpence a-day, I have been

assured, is a common price of common labour. In the same islands,

they knit worsted stockings to the value of a guinea a pair and

upwards.