Bailie MacConachie made a mistake when he risked a war with the boys of the Seminary, and it was colossal folly on his part to continue the war after his first defeat in the affair of the advertisement. No doubt it was humiliating to have his respectable place of business filled with the mob of Muirtown demanding whisky as a right, and threatening him with penalties as a covenant-breaker when they did not get it; he had also very good reasons for believing that the unholy inspiration which gathered the vagrants to his shop came from the Seminary. His best policy, however, would have been to treat the matter as a joke; and if the Bailie had stopped on his way to dinner, and told the boys plainly that he knew quite well they were at the bottom of the affair, that they were a set of confounded young rascals, that he had intended to hang six of them and send the rest to penal servitude, that he was going to forgive them for the sake of their unhappy parents, and because it had not been half bad fun after all, that there would be no more policemen before the Seminary, and there must be no more windows smashed in his (the Bailie's) house--the Seminary, which always respected a fellow who took his licking with good humour and didn't squeal, would have given the Bailie the best cheer he ever got in his public career, and a covenant of peace would have been made between him and the boys which would never have been forgotten. Had another pane of glass been broken by a Seminary ball, the value thereof in a packet of halfpence, with an expression of regret, would have been handed in before evening. The honorary freedom of the school would have been conferred on the Bailie, without any public ceremony, but with immense practical advantage, and although the Bailie was surfeited with civic honours, yet even he might have tasted a new pleasure as he passed along the terrace to see the boys suspend a game for an instant to let him pass in stately walk, and to hear Speug cry, "Oot o' the Bailie's road," and to receive a salute from tailless Highland bonnets that were touched to none outside the school, except to the Count and Dr. Manley. If Providence had given a touch of imagination to the Bailie, and his head had not been swollen by a position approaching that of the angels, he would have come to terms at once with the boys, in which case bygones would have been bygones, and he would have been spared much humiliation.