, along with the poukit hens, which I fancy the
town-offishers took home and cooked for their dinner; so they shook hands
with the drummer, wishing him a good-day and a pleasant walk home,
brushing away on the road to Edinburgh, where their wives and weans, who
had no doubt made a good supper on the spuilzie of the hens, had gone
away before, maybe to have something comfortable for their arrival, their
walk being likely to give them an appetite.

Had they taken away all the rest of the hens, and only left the bantams,
on which they must have found but desperate little eating, and the muffed
one, I would have cared less; it being from several circumstances a pet
one in the family, having been brought in a blackbird's cage by the
carrier from Lauder, from my wife's mother, in a present to Benjie on his
birth-day. The creature almost grat himself blind, when he heard of our
having seen it roasting in a string by the legs before the fire, and
found its bonny muffed head in a corner.

But let alone likings, the callant was otherwise a loser in its death,
she having regularly laid a caller egg to him every morning, which he got
along with his tea and bread, to the no small benefit of his health,
being, as I have taken occasion to remark before, far from being
robusteous in the constitution. I am sure I know one thing, and that is,
that I would have willingly given the louns a crown-piece to have
preserved it alive, hen though it was of my own; but no--the bloody deed
was over and done, before we were aware that the poor thing's life was
sacrificed.

The names of the two Eirishers were John Dochart and Dennis Flint, both,
according to their own deponement, from the county of Tipperary; and
weel-a-wat the place has no great credit in producing two such bairns.
Often, after that, did I look through that part of the Advertizer
newspapers, that has a list of all the accidents, and so on, just above
the births, marriages and deaths, which I liked to read regularly.
Howsoever, it was two years before I discovered their names again, having
it seems, during a great part of that period, lived under the forged name
of Alias; and I saw that they were both shipped off at Leith, for
transportation to some country called the Hulks, for being habit and
repute thieves, and for having made a practice of coining bad silver.
The thing, however, that condemned them, was for having knocked down a
drunk man, in a beastly state of intoxication,