CHAPTER X--ON HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE Marget Maclean (or one of her sisters) was accustomed when the mails contained a letter on His Majesty’s Service for the Paymaster, to put on a bonnet, and in a mild flurry cross the street, feeling herself a sharer in the great matters of State. So important was the mission that she had been known even to shut her shop door for the time of her absence upon eager and numerous youths waiting the purchase of her superior “black man,” a comfit more succulent with her than with Jenny Anderson in Crombie’s Land, or on older patrons seeking the hire of the new sensation in literature--something with a tomb by Mrs. Radcliffe. “Tell your mistress I wish to see her,” she would say on these occasions with great pomp to Peggy, but even Miss Mary was not sufficiently close to State to be entrusted with the missive. “Goodday, Miss Campbell, I called to see Captain John on important business,” and the blue document with its legend and seal would be clutched with mittened hands tight to the faded bodice. Miss Mary shared some of this awe for State documents; at least she helped out the illusion that they were worth all this anxiety on the part of the post-office, and she would call the Paymaster from his breakfast. His part on the other hand was to depreciate their importance. He would take the most weighty and portentous with an air of contempt. “What’s this, Miss Maclean?” he would say impatiently with the snuff-pinch suspended between his pocket and his nose. “A king’s letter. Confound the man! what can he be wanting now?” Then with a careless forefinger he would break the seal and turn the paper outside in, heedless (to all appearance) as if it were an old copy of the _Courier_. One day such a letter sent his face flaming as he returned to the breakfast table. He looked at Miss Mary, sitting subdued behind her urn and Gilian at her side, and then at his brothers, hardly yet awake in the early morning, whose breakfasts in that small-windowed room it needed two or three candles to illuminate. “The county corps is coming south this way,” said he, with a great restraint upon his feelings. Cornal Colin turned on him a lustreless eye. “What havers are you on now, John?” said he, with no pause in the supping of his porridge. Dugald paid no heed. With a hand a little palsied he buttered a scone, and his lower lip was dropped and his eyes were vacant, showing him far absent in the spirit. Conversation was never very rife at the Paymaster’s breakfast table. “I’m telling you the county corps is coming south,” said Mars, with what for him to the field officer was almost testiness. “Here’s a command for billeting three hundred men on Friday night on their way to Dumbarton.”