On the left of the host sat the Chevalier Laird of Drumquhasel, a tall, stark, and sunburned soldier, on whose breast sparkled several French orders; and near him was the chirurgeon, who was the very counterpart of the divine, a laughing, bullet-headed, merry-faced little man, about sixty years of age. Like his clerical brother, he was in the habit of averring that he had been broiled at Tangier, half-drowned at Bergen-op-zoom, and wholly frozen in the Zuider Zee; blown up in Flanders, and trod down in Alsace, for he always charged in the line-of-battle, and consequently neglected his professional duties; or, like many sons of the healing god, was wont to introduce its topics at unseasonable times; and he was then, in the style of a lecturer of the old College of Physic at the Cowgate Port, employed in tracing the spinal marrow of a hare, for his own amusement and the edification of Jerry Smith, a gay fellow, with a curly perriwig and thick mustache, the same who afterwards entered the English service and became so famous for his gallantries at Halifax in Yorkshire. There were present many handsome young sparks, whose first fields had been Sedgemoor in the south, or Muirdykes in the north; and their smooth chins and fair faces contrasted well with those war-worn cavaliers, whose service included the Scottish battles of Dunbar and Inverkeithing, the sack of Dundee, and the fight at Kerbister, and whose sparkling stars and crosses attested the good deeds they had performed under Henri d'Avergne, le Mareschal Turenne, and the great Condé of glorious memory, especially old Drumquhasel. When the Duc d'Enghien charged the Mareschal de l'Hôpital so successfully that the Spanish infantry, till then deemed the finest in the world, were swept before the victorious French, there was not a chevalier of St. Louis who distinguished himself more than old John of Drumquhasel, who with his own hand cut down the famous Count de Fuentes, for which he was thanked by Monsieur of France at Versailles, and had a chaplet placed upon his head by Mademoiselle la Fleur, the reigning favourite of the time. Douglas was joyous and gay; but Walter was somewhat reserved and abstracted; he foresaw that this great military reunion would interfere with his evening visit to the Napiers, and he was bored by the gaiety of the young, as much as by the prosing of the older soldiers around him. "Hector Gavin, harkee," said the divine to a tall officer whose looped doublet and black corslet announced him Lieutenant of the Grenadiers, a species of force introduced about ten years before,--"Master Gibbie, our right honourable host informs me that there are some excellent pigeons in the casemates of that same castle of Tangier before you; and if you will so far favour me----"