I was walking with my father at the time. He had ridden the long way from Kirrieoch on a white pony, all to pleasure my mother. ’Ye maun gang and hear the laddie gie his evidence,’ she bade him. ’They will fright him to deid else, amang thae Edinburgh men o’ the law. They are no canny. So long as Launce gets striking at them with the steel I ken he is safe and sound. For his hand can e’en keep his head, as a Kennedy’s ever should. But wha kens what they may do to my laddie when he stands afore the justicers, and the lawyer loons come at him wi’ their quips and quandaries?’ ’Faith then, good wife,’ said my father, ’ye shall come too. And thou and I shall ride to Edinburgh like joes that are newly wed.’ And though at first she denied, yet at the last she consented, well-pleased enough—having a desire to purchase garmentry more suitable for the wife of a laird and the mother of one who was to be made a knight. When my mother went out for the first time, she held up her hands and exclaimed at the noise and bustle of the High Street—the soldiers who were for ever marching to and fro in companies with drums and pipes, the lasses that went hither and thither with a shawl about their heads, and bandied compliments—and such compliments—with swashbucklers and rantipole ’prentice lads. ’The limmers, they need soundly skelping!’ said my mother, ’for a’ that they carry their heads so high, and their kirtles higher than their heads!’ ’Surely scantly that!’ said my father. ’But ay,’ continued my mother, not heeding him in her press of speech, ’such hair-brained hempies wad be dookit in the Limmers’ Dub on Saturday in every decent country, and set on the black stool of repentance ilka Sabbath day. I wonder what the King and the ministers o’ Edinburgh can be thinkin’ o’?’ There was, however, for most of us a long and weary waiting, ere in the town of Edinburgh the High Court of Justiciary was ripe for the hearing of the case against the Mures. But when at last the great day came the whole West Country was there.[#] [#] Sir Launcelot Kennedy, of Palgowan and Kirrieoch, appears somewhat to have confused the dates of the first and second trials of John Mure of Auchendrayne. Indeed, weakness in exact chronology is common to his record and to the contemporary Historie of the Kennedies, which was written about the same time by a partisan of the other side—it may even be by John Mure of Auchendrayne himself.