“Of course, of course,” said he soothingly. “Was't ever otherwise when the devil joggled an elbow? Whatever it was, accident or design, it's a session lost. Pack up, Paul, my very young boy, and we'll e'en make our way quietly from this place where they may ken us.” He paid the landlady her lawing, with sixpence over for her motherliness, whereat she was ready to greet, and he took an end of my blue kist down the stairs with me, and over with it like a common porter to the carrier's stance. A raw, raining day, and the rough highways over the hoof with slush of melted snow, we were a chittering pair as we drove under the tilt of the cart that came to the Mearns to meet us, and it was a dumb and solemn home-coming for me. Not that I cared much myself, for my lawyership thus cracked in the shell, as it were I had been often seized with the notion that six feet of a moor-lander, in a lustre gown and a horse-hair wig and a blue shalloon bag for the fees, was a wastry of good material. But it was the dad and her at home I thought of, and could put my neck below the cartwheel for distressing. I knew what he thought of as he sat in the cart corner, for many a time he had told me his plans; and now they were sadly marred. I was to get as much as I could from the prelections of Professor Reid, work my way through the furrows of Van Eck, Van Muyden, and the Pandects, then go to Utrecht or Groningen for the final baking, and come back to the desk of Coghill and Sproat, Writers to the Signet, in Spreull's Land of Edinburgh; run errands between that dusty hole and the taverns of Salamander Land, where old Sproat (that was my father's doer) held long sederunts with his clients, to write a thesis finally, and graduate at the art of making black look--not altogether white perhaps, but a kind of dirty grey. I had been even privileged to try a sampling of the lawyer's life before I went to college, in the chambers of MacGibbon of Lanark town, where I spent a summer (that had been more profitably passed in my father's fields), backing letters, fair-copying drafts of lease and process, and indexing the letter-book. The last I hated least of all, for I could have a half-sheet of foolscap between the pages, and under MacGibbon's very nose try my hand at something sombre in the manner of the old ancient ballads of the Border. Doing that same once, I gave a wild cry and up with my inky hand and shook it. “Eh! eh!” cried MacGibbon, thinking I had gone mad. “What ails ye?” “He struck me with his sword!” said I like a fool, not altogether out of my frenzy; and then the snuffy old body came round the corner of the desk, keeked into the letter-book where I should have been doing his work, and saw that I was wasting good paper with clinking trash. “Oh, sirs! sirs! I never misused a minute of my youth in the like of that!” said he, sneering, and the sneer hurt. “No, I daresay not,” I answered him. “Perhaps ye never had the inclination--nor the art.”