And, getting again upon his legs, he hurried out, throwing back his injunctions upon S---- to obey his instructions. In a few minutes more he was again upon the road, leaving the clatter of his horse's hoofs to mingle with the confused thoughts of his mystified client. Arrived at the High Street, where, as used to be said of him, he could not be ten minutes without having seized some five or six persons by the breast of the coat, and put as many questions on various matters of business, just as the thought struck him on the instant, he pounced upon one, no other than the confidential clerk of the fiscal. "I say, man," seizing and holding him in the usual way, "have you catched the woman yet?" "What woman?" replied the clerk. "The woman with the white mice." "Oh," cried the young man, "we have no faith in that quarter--a mere get-up; but we're looking about for her, notwithstanding." "Well, tell your master that Meg Davidson was last seen on the Muir of Rannoch, and that the Highlanders in that outlandish quarter, having never seen white mice before, are in a state of perfect amazement." A bolt at some other person left the clerk probably in as great amazement as the Highlanders; but our man of the law did not stop to see the extent of it. All his avocations, however, did not prevent the coming round of that seven o'clock on Wednesday evening, which he had appointed as the hour of meeting with the woman on whom his hopes of saving his client almost altogether rested. He was at his desk at the hour, and the woman, no doubt eager for the phenomenon of the "louping ee," was as true as the time itself. The writer locked the door of his office, and drawing her as near him as possible, inquired first whether any knew she was in town. "Deil are," she replied; "naebody cares for me ony mair than I were an auld glandered spavin, ready for the knackers." "And you've been remembering a' ye are to say?" Now, the woman did not answer this question immediately. She had been, for some days, busy in the repository of her memory--a crazy box of shattered spunk-wood, through the crevices of which came the lurid lights sent from another box, called the imagination, and such was the close intimacy, or rather mixture, of the revelations of these two magic centres, that they could not be distinguished from one another; but the habit of fortune-telling had so quickened the light of the one, as to make it predominate over, and almost extinguish that of the other, so that she was at a loss to get a stray glimmer of the memory, to make her ready, on the instant, for the answer. "Remembering! Ay," she said, "there's no muckle to remember. The lass was under the burden of shame, and couldna bear it: she wanted some doctor's trash to tak that burden aff her, if it should carry her life alang wi' 't. I got the stuff, and the woman dee'd."