solved,"
I said: "I shall go with you by all means, and take notes of your
speech." We marched into town, about sixteen in number; and, on joining
the crowd already assembled on the Links, were recognised, by the deep
red hue of our clothes and aprons, which differed considerably from that
borne by workers in the paler Edinburgh stone, as a reinforcement from a
distance, and were received with loud cheers. Charles, however, did not
make his speech: the meeting, which was about eight hundred strong,
seemed fully in the possession of a few crack orators, who spoke with a
fluency to which he could make no pretensions; and so he replied to the
various calls from among his comrades, of "Cha, Cha," by assuring them
that he could not catch the eye of the gentleman in the chair. The
meeting had, of course, neither chair nor chairman; and after a good
deal of idle speech-making, which seemed to satisfy the speakers
themselves remarkably well, but which at least some of their auditory
regarded as nonsense, we found that the only motion on which we could
harmoniously agree was a motion for an adjournment. And so we adjourned
till the evening, fixing as our place of meeting one of the humbler
halls of the city.

My comrades proposed that we should pass the time until the hour of
meeting in a public-house; and, desirous of securing a glimpse of the
sort of enjoyment for which they sacrificed so much, I accompanied them.
Passing not a few more inviting-looking places, we entered a low tavern
in the upper part of the Canongate, kept in an old half-ruinous
building, which has since disappeared. We passed on through a narrow
passage to a low-roofed room in the centre of the erection, into which
the light of day never penetrated, and in which the gas was burning
dimly in a close sluggish atmosphere, rendered still more stifling by
tobacco-smoke, and a strong smell of ardent spirits. In the middle of
the crazy floor there was a trap-door which lay open at the time; and a
wild combination of sounds, in which the yelping of a dog, and a few
gruff voices that seemed cheering him on, were most noticeable, rose
from the apartment below. It was customary at this time for dram-shops
to keep badgers housed in long narrow boxes, and for working men to keep
dogs; and it was part of the ordinary sport of such places to set the
dogs to unhouse the badgers. The wild sport which Scott describes in his
"Guy Mannering," as pursued by Dandy Dinmont and hi