The bride raised her eyes; her maidens turning round from the tub, looked towards the window, where they beheld Watty standing, his white teeth and large delighted eyes glittering in the light of the room. It is impossible to describe the consternation of the ladies at this profane intrusion on their peculiar mysteries. The bride was the first that recovered her self-possession: leaping from her seat, and oversetting the tub in her fury, she bounded to the door, and, seizing Watty by the cuff of the neck, shook him as a tigress would a buffalo. ‘The deevil ride a-hunting on you, Watty Walkinshaw, I’ll gar you glower in at windows,’ was her endearing salutation, seconded by the whole vigour of her hand in a smack on the face, so impressive, that it made him yell till the very echoes yelled again. ‘Gang hame wi’ you, ye roaring bull o’ Bashen, or I’ll take a rung to your back,’ then followed; and the terrified bridegroom instantly fled coweringly, as if she actually was pursuing him with a staff. ‘I trow,’ said she, addressing herself to the young ladies who had come to the door after her, ‘I’ll learn him better manners, before he’s long in my aught.’ ‘I would be none surprised were he to draw back,’ said Miss Jenny Shortridge, a soft and diffident girl, who, instead of joining in the irresistible laughter of her companions, had continued silent, and seemed almost petrified. ‘Poo!’ exclaimed the bride; ‘he draw back! Watty Walkinshaw prove false to me! He dare na, woman, for his very life; but, come, let us gang in and finish the fun.’ But the fun had suffered a material abatement by the breach which had thus been made in it. Miss Meg Walkinshaw, however, had the good luck to find the ring, a certain token that she would be the next married. In the meantime, the chastised bridegroom, in running homeward, was met by his brothers and their companions, to whose merriment he contributed quite as much as he had subtracted from that of the ladies, by the sincerity with which he related what had happened,--declaring, that he would rather stand in the kirk than tak Betty Bodle; which determination Charles, in the heedlessness and mirth of the moment, so fortified and encouraged, that, before they had returned back to the punch-bowl, Walter was swearing that neither father nor mother would force him to marry such a dragoon. The old man seemed more disturbed than might have been expected from his knowledge of the pliancy of Walter’s disposition at hearing him in this humour, while the Leddy said, with all the solemnity suitable to her sense of the indignity which her favourite had suffered,--