"Hee, hee! the haill barony o' Bruntisfield is a braw tocher!--think o' its pertinents, forbye the lands o' Puddockdub, whilk yield o' clear rental ten thousand merks after paying Kirk and King!" "King and Kirk, you mean." "I say Kirk and King--hee, hee! The times are changing, and we maun change wi' them." "Zounds! I believe the old fool is too drunk to hear me. Harkee! gossip Mersington, you know I lost a thousand pounds to that addlepate, Holsterlee, on our race at Leith, where my boasted mare failed so devilishly." "Had ye tar-barrelled the carlin Elshender, it would hae been another story," grumbled Juden, as he replenished the tankards. "A drowning man will cling to straws. By all the devils, on that race hung the partial retrieval or utter ruin of my fortune! 'Tis a debt of honour--the money is unpaid, and must be discharged with others, even should I turn footpad to raise the testers." "'Tis an auld song, Randal--the fag-end of a career o' wickedness and depravity--birling the wine-cup, and flaunting wi' bona robas," replied Mersington, practising his now snuffling tone, and shaking his head with solemn but tipsy gravity in the new character his cunning led him to assume. "A just retribution on the crying sins, blasphemies, and enormities, anent whilk see the act (damn the act!) committed in the days o' your dolefu' backsliding. I doubt you'll hae to take a turn wi' the Scots' Dutch, like Jock the Laird's brother." "My drivelling gossip," said Clermistonlee, with considerable hauteur, "you forget that it beseems not a Baron to be so roughly schooled by the mere Goodman of Mersington." "Byde ye there, billy," exclaimed the other. "Gudeman, quotha! we hold our fief by knight's service, of the Scottish crown; and ken ye, Randal, that such as hold their lands of the King direct are styled Lairds; but such as held their tacks of a subject were styled gudemen; a custom hath lately gone into disuse, as Rosehaugh saith in his folio on Precedence." "Laird or Lord, I care not a brass bodle. No man shall assume the part of monitor to me! Again and again I have told thee, Mersington, that my whole soul, for this year past, has been bent upon the possession of Lilian Napier, and her acres of wood and wold; and dost think, gossip, that I, who have subdued so many fine women (yea, and some deuced haughty ones, too), shall be baffled by a little moppet like this? Come, good gossip, assist me with thy advice. I have ever found your invention fertile, your advice able, your cunning matchless. Canst think of no new plan, by which to----Hah! who the devil can that be, now?" he exclaimed, as another furious knocking at the outer gate cut short his adjuration; and he listened anxiously, muttering, "'Tis long past midnight; some drunken mudlark, I warrant."