“You are certainly a strong majority,” said my friend, “against me; but still I recant not my original opinion. Edinburgh before the world. For a hospitality that never tires; for pleasant fellows that improve every day of your acquaintance; for pretty girls that make you long for a repeal of the canon about being only singly blessed, and lead you to long for a score of them, Edinburgh,--I say again, before the world.” “Their ankles are devilish thick,” whispered Maurice. “A calumny, a base calumny!” “And then they drink--” “Oh--” “Yes; they drink very strong tea.” “Shall we ha’e a glass o’ sherry together, Hampden?” said the Scotch doctor, willing to acknowledge his defence of auld Reekie. “And we’ll take O’Malley in,” said Hampden; “he looks imploringly.” “And now to return to the charge,” quoth Maurice. “In what particular dare ye contend the palm with Dublin? We’ll not speak of beauty. I can’t suffer any such profane turn in the conversation as to dispute the superiority of Irishwomen’s lips, eyes, noses, and eyebrows, to anything under heaven. We’ll not talk of gay fellows; egad, we needn’t. I’ll give you the garrison,--a decent present,--and I’ll back the Irish bar for more genuine drollery, more wit, more epigram, more ready sparkling fun, than the whole rest of the empire--ay, and all her colonies--can boast of.” “They are nae remarkable for passing the bottle, if they resemble their very gifted advocate,” observed the Scotchman. “But they are for filling and emptying both, making its current, as it glides by, like a rich stream glittering in the sunbeams with the sparkling lustre of their wit. Lord, how I’m blown! Fill my pannikin, Charley. There’s no subduing a Scot. Talk with him, drink with him, fight with him, and he’ll always have the last of it; there’s only one way of concluding the treaty--” “And that is--” “Blarney him. Lord bless you, he can’t stand it! Tell him Holyrood’s like Versailles, and the Trossach’s finer than Mont Blanc; that Geordie Buchanan was Homer, and the Canongate, Herculaneum,--then ye have him on the hip. Now, ye never can humbug an Irishman that way; he’ll know you’re quizzing him when you praise his country.” “Ye are right, Hampden,” said the Scotch doctor, in reply to some observation. “We are vara primitive in the Hielands, and we keep to our ain national customs in dress and everything; and we are vara slow to learn, and even when we try we are nae ower successfu’ in our imitations, which sometimes cost us dearly enough. Ye may have heard, may be, of the M’Nab o’ that ilk, and what happened him with the king’s equerry?” “I’m not quite certain,” said Hampden, “if I ever heard the story.”