Williamson was not backward in contributing to the Sheriff's conviviality. His own account of his motives was, that knowing Forbes to be prepared to decide unfairly, he wished to keep him so hard at his beloved pursuit of drinking, that he should have no opportunity of exercising his other avocation of judging. Accordingly, he employed a friend "to tenchel and drink" the Sheriff--or, as it is elsewhere expressed, "to drink him hard;" in fact, the operation is talked of quite in an abbreviated and technical form, as a common proceeding in the way of business in the Sheriff Court. The drouthy crony who performed this duty seems to have taken to it with the same disinterested zeal, with which Kean sat up three nights drinking with a friend under depression, for the purpose of keeping up his spirits. The favoured individual must have felt his task coming light to his hands, when he found the Sheriff in a tavern "busy at hot punch about eleven o'clock forenoon." An attempt was made on him by the enemy, but Williamson and his drinking assistant carried him off in triumph to the "New Inn" to dinner, where, however, they were obliged to submit to the presence of the other party, who held a hospitable competition with them in plying the Sheriff with the liquor which he loved. Here they all "sat close drinking, as is the phrase in that part of the country, _helter skelter_--that is, copiously and alternately of different liquors--till 11 o'clock at night, when Forbes, by this time dead-drunk, was conveyed home by his two servant maids, with the assistance of George Williamson, Gerard, and the Pursuer." This is the counsel's history of the day, and that it is not an exaggerated one, we may infer from an average quotation from the evidence: one of the witnesses thus concludes his narrative:-- "Depones, that from four o'clock in the afternoon to eleven o'clock that night, they all drunk what they call in Aberdeenshire _Helter Skelter_, alternately of different liquors, and plentifully, in such a way that the Sheriff in particular was very drunk, and the deponent himself was also drunk. That the Sheriff's two servant maids came for him with a lantern to carry him home, and came into the room where the company was, and staid there some time--fully a quarter of an hour--and got some drink, but what it was he cannot tell. That the Sheriff called for a good part of the liquor which was drunk. That at last the deponent assisted to carry home the Sheriff, who was not able to walk; and either the pursuer or Mr Gerard assisted the deponent in so doing; and the two maids went before him with a lantern, and placed him in his easy-chair in his bedroom, and then the Sheriff called upon his maids to give the company drink, which the maids refused to give, and then they came away and left him."