When a day and night more than had been calculated upon were expired, without any tidings of the royal squadron, the gloom of the Athenian authorities became sad in the extreme. Here you would find one wight twining up the steep acclivities of Arthur’s Seat, jerking his fatigued corpus upon the pile of coal which had been collected upon the top for a bon-fire, and straining his owl-like eyes to penetrate the dense fog of the eastern horizon, like a conjuror ogling the volume of futurity; and there would go a frowsy bailie or fat sheriff hotching and blowing to the observatory on the Calton Hill, keeping the anxious window of his wisdom for ten minutes at the telescope, and leaving it with a growl that he could “see nothing,”--and how could he, bless his honest soul! for he had not removed the brass cap from its opposite extremity? No matter: bailies and sheriffs must understand Erskine’s Institutes, but a telescope was quite another thing. Amid this looking and lamenting, the wind freshened, and it rained; and there were also one or two distant growls of thunder, which fear very naturally converted into signals of distress from his Majesty’s yacht. Upon this, the mental agony became immense; and, saving an attempt on the part of Kerne of the Clan Donnochie, to open with his dirk a free passage for the soul of a Canon-gate constable, no event had broken the gloom of that dismal Tuesday. “Mirk Monday” had long been a day accursed in the Scottish calendar, and it was now feared that his younger brother was to reign in his stead. Next morning was little better; and though all the loyal spirits of Athens scrambled to the heights to call the king from the fog-enshrouded and “vasty deep,” there was no answer to their call, save the hollow booming of the east wind, and the melancholy scream of these sea-fowl which had escaped from the storm. They who had been instrumental in bringing their sovereign into such peril, wist not what to do; and, as is the case with most men in such a situation, they did nothing,--at least nothing which could increase his safety, or accelerate his arrival.