Count was more gratified than by anything that had happened
to him since he came to Muirtown; and throwing up one of the newly
repaired windows he made an eloquent speech, in which he referred to Sir
Walter Scott and Queen Mary and the Fair Maid of Perth, among other
romantic trifles; declared that the fight between the "Pennies" and the
Seminary was worthy of the great Napoleon; pronounced Speug to be _un
brave garcon_; expressed his regret that he could not receive the
school in his limited apartments, but invited them to cross with him to
the Seminary tuck-shop, where he entertained the whole set to Mistress
MacWhae's best home-made ginger-beer. He also desired that Mistress
Jamieson should come forward to the window with him and bow to the
school, while he held her hand--which the Count felt would have been a
really interesting tableau. It certainly would have been, but Mistress
Jamieson refused to assist in the most decided terms.

"Me stand wi' the Count at an open window, hand in hand wi' him, and
bowin', if ye please, to thae blackguard laddies? Na, na; I'm a widow o'
good character, and a member o' the Free Kirk, and it would ill set me
to play such tricks. But I'll say this for the Count--he behaved
handsome; and I'm judgin' the'll no' be another pane o' glass broken in
my house so long as the Count is in it." And there never was.

It were not possible to imagine anything more different than a Muirtown
boy and the Count; but boys judge by an instinct which never fails
within its own range, and Muirtown Seminary knew that, with all his
foreign ways, the Count was a man. Legends gathered around him and
flourished exceedingly, being largely invented by Nestie, and offered
for consumption at the mouth of the pistol by Speug, who let it be
understood that to deny or even to smile at Nestie's most incredible
invention would be a ground of personal offence. The Count was in turn
a foreign nobleman, who had fallen in love with the Emperor of Austria's
daughter and had been exiled by the imperial parent, but that the
Princess was true to the Count, and that any day he might be called from
Mistress Jamieson's lodgings to the palace of Vienna; that he was
himself a king of some mysterious European State, who had been driven
out by conspirators, but whose people were going to restore him, and
that some day Speug would be staying with the Count in his royal abode
and possibly sitting beside him on the throne. During this