"The waur for themselves and the country baith, St. Ronan's--it's the jinketing and the jirbling wi' tea and wi' trumpery that brings our nobles to nine-pence, and mony a het ha'-house to a hired lodging in the Abbey." The young gentleman paused for a few minutes--filled a bumper, and pushed the bottle to the senior--then said abruptly, "Do you believe in luck, Mick?" "In luck?" answered the attorney; "what do you mean by the question?" "Why, because I believe in luck myself--in a good or bad run of luck at cards." "You wad have mair luck the day, if you had never touched them," replied his confident. "That is not the question now," said Mowbray; "but what I wonder at is the wretched chance that has attended us miserable Lairds of St. Ronan's for more than a hundred years, that we have always been getting worse in the world, and never better. Never has there been such a backsliding generation, as the parson would say--half the country once belonged to my ancestors, and now the last furrows of it seem to be flying." "Fleeing!" said the writer, "they are barking and fleeing baith.--This Shaws-Castle here, I'se warrant it flee up the chimney after the rest, were it not weel fastened down with your grandfather's tailzie." "Damn the tailzie!" said Mowbray; "if they had meant to keep up their estate, they should have entailed it when it was worth keeping: to tie a man down to such an insignificant thing as St. Ronan's, is like tethering a horse on six roods of a Highland moor." "Ye have broke weel in on the mailing by your feus down at the Well," said Meiklewham, "and raxed ower the tether maybe a wee bit farther than ye had ony right to do." "It was by your advice, was it not?" said the Laird. "I'se ne'er deny it, St. Ronan's," answered the writer; "but I am such a gude-natured guse, that I just set about pleasing you as an auld wife pleases a bairn." "Ay," said the man of pleasure, "when she reaches it a knife to cut its own fingers with.--These acres would have been safe enough, if it had not been for your d----d advice." "And yet you were grumbling e'en now," said the man of business, "that you have not the power to gar the whole estate flee like a wild-duck across a bog? Troth, you need care little about it; for if you have incurred an irritancy--and sae thinks Mr. Wisebehind, the advocate, upon an A. B. memorial that I laid before him--your sister, or your sister's goodman, if she should take the fancy to marry, might bring a declarator, and evict St. Ronan's frae ye in the course of twa or three sessions." "My sister will never marry," said John Mowbray. "That's easily said," replied the writer; "but as broken a ship's come to land. If ony body kend o' the chance she has o' the estate, there's mony a weel-doing man would think little of the bee in her bonnet." "Harkye, Mr. Meiklewham," said the Laird, "I will be obliged to you if you will speak of Miss Mowbray with the respect due to her father's daughter, and my sister."