"Right! 'twas but the feeling of a moment for the misfortunes of our former friends, whose hearts, to their honour (unlike ours) were better than their heads." "Puir chields--puir chields--I doubt the Act of eighty-nine presses unco hard on some of them." "Among other letters, is one from that wild spark, Douglas of Finland, once a lieutenant in the regiment of Dunbarton, addressed to his false leman, Mistress Annie Laurie. Poor credulous fool, to trust in a woman's faith! He knows not that she hath become Lady Craigdarroch, and so hath forgot him in the arms of his friend. I like love-letters, having written some bushels of them in my time; but his--by the devil's beard!--it equals anything in the _Banished Virgin_, or _Cassandra_. I have taken the liberty to confiscate it to my own use; and here it is." "Hold! a thought strikes me; the hand is easy of imitation, and for what may ye no add a postscriptum, whilk may be of service in your love affair, by wedding young Fenton----" "The devil confound him!" "To some airy damoiselle; or knocking him on the head during his French campaign?" "'Tis all one. Excellent! Juden will deliver it. Annie will fly to her gossip, with every string in her boddice straining with the greatness of her intelligence; and as we never knew a damsel prefer a dead lover to a living one, we may imagine or hope the issue. 'Tis sublime!" "I wad rather hae a dead gudewife, I ken--he, he!" said Mersington, as he adjusted his wig and took his friend's arm, striking his gold-headed cane on the pavement with the air of a man who has said something smart; "but let us hae nae mair o' your plaguy qualms o' conscience, for they dinna dovetail weel wi' the general tenour o' your way. Weel, anent this postscriptum--he, he!--let us adjourn to----" "Hugh Blair's, you would say. Poor Hugh! his locale hath changed with the times, and there is nothing now but gloom and obscurity, cobwebs and dust, where all was once courtly merriment and joyous revelry. Who could have imagined that a time would come when this famous coffee-house would be voted 'a den of cavalier iniquity'--that the buirdly hosteller with whom the noble Perth, the gallant Dunbarton, and the courtly Dundee wiled away the hours at picquet and tric-trac, and pushed the wine from hand to hand, would be accused of those honours as a crime, and thrown into the iron-room of the Tolbooth, there to languish in poverty and misery, while the luscious contents of his well-stored cellars were confiscated to the public use?" "It ill beseems ye to condemn the last clause in your interlocutor, my noble gossip, when the maist of the precious contents of Hughie's runlets ran owre your ain craig. My certie! you had a braw rug at the forfeitures, baith gentle and semple!" "Ha, ha! enough of this--the present business is to procure the use of an inkhorn. I am restricted in wine to drink medicated Hippocras. What art grinning at now?"