A circumstance, however, occurred at the time, which tended materially to diminish his anxieties: A number of gentlemen belonging to the royal city had projected a sea excursion in Allan M’Lean’s pilot-boat, and one of the party proposed to Kittlestonheugh that he should be of their party--for they were all friends, and sympathized, of course, with the most heartfelt commiseration, for the loss he had sustained in his wife, who had been nearly twenty years almost as much dead as alive, and particularly in the grief he suffered by the injudicious marriage of his daughter. George, with his habitual suavity, accepted the invitation; and on the selfsame day that our friend and personal acquaintance Walkinshaw set off in the coach from the classical and manufacturing town (as we believe Gibbon the historian yclyped the royal city) for the soi-disant intellectual metropolis and modern Athens of Edinburgh, his uncle embarked at the stair of the west quay of Greenock. What stores were laid in by those Glasgow Argonautics--what baskets of limes, what hampers of wine and rum, and loaves of sugar, and cheese and bacon hams, with a modicum of biscuit,--we must leave for some more circumstantial historian to describe. Sufficient for us, and for all acquainted with the munificent consideration of the Glottiani for themselves, is the fact, that seven of the primest magnates of the royal city embarked together to enjoy the sea air, and the appetite consequent thereon, in one of the best sailing and best navigated schooners at that time on the west of Scotland. Whether any of them, in the course of the voyage, suffered the affliction of sea-sickness, we have never heard; but from our own opinion, believing the thing probable, we shall not enter into any controversy on the subject. There was, to be sure, some rumour shortly after, that, off Ailsa, they did suffer from one kind of malady or another; but whether from eating of that delicious encourager of appetite, solan goose--the most savoury product of the rocky pyramid--or from a stomachique inability to withstand the tossings of the sea, we have never received any satisfactory explanation. Be this, however, as it may, no jovial, free-hearted, good kind of men, ever enjoyed themselves better than the party aboard the pilot boat.