‘Wha kens?’ answered he; ’they’re queer deevils; maybe I might just have ’scaped ae gang to meet the other.  And yet I’ll no say that neither; for if that randy wife was coming to Charlie’s Hope, she should have a pint bottle o’ brandy and a pound o’ tobacco to wear her through the winter.  They’re queer deevils; as my auld father used to say, they’re warst where they’re warst guided.  After a’, there’s baith gude and ill about the gipsies.’

This, and some other desultory conversation, served as a ’shoeing-horn’ to draw on another cup of ale and another ‘cheerer,’ as Dinmont termed it in his country phrase, of brandy and water.  Brown then resolutely declined all further conviviality for that evening, pleading his own weariness and the effects of the skirmish, being well aware that it would have availed nothing to have remonstrated with his host on the danger that excess might have occasioned to his own raw wound and bloody coxcomb.  A very small bed-room, but a very clean bed, received the traveller, and the sheets made good the courteous vaunt of the hostess, ’that they would be as pleasant as he could find ony gate, for they were washed wi’ the fairy-well water, and bleached on the bonny white gowans, and bittled by Nelly and herself, and what could woman, if she was a queen, do mair for them?’

They indeed rivalled snow in whiteness, and had, besides, a pleasant fragrance from the manner in which they had been bleached.  Little Wasp, after licking his master’s hand to ask leave, couched himself on the coverlet at his feet; and the traveller’s senses were soon lost in grateful oblivion.

CHAPTER XXV

Give ye, Britons, then,
Your sportive fury, pitiless to pour
Loose on the nightly robber of the fold. 
Him from his craggy winding haunts unearth’d,
Let all the thunder of the chase pursue.

THOMSON’S Seasons.

Brown rose early in the morning and walked out to look at the establishment of his new friend.  All was rough and neglected in the neighbourhood of the house;—­a paltry garden, no pains taken to make the vicinity dry or comfortable, and a total absence of all those little neatnesses which give the eye so much pleasure in looking at an English farm-house.  There were, notwithstanding, evident signs that this arose only from want of taste or ignorance, not from poverty or the negligence which attends it.  On the contrary, a noble cow-house, well filled with good milk-cows, a feeding-house, with ten bullocks of the most approved breed, a stable, with two good teams of horses, the appearance of domestics active, industrious, and apparently contented with their lot; in a word, an air of liberal though sluttish plenty indicated the wealthy farmer.  The situation of the house above the river formed a gentle declivity, which relieved the inhabitants of the nuisances that might otherwise have stagnated around it.  At a