d advocate and Mr Secretary of State wrote me back by retour
of post, thanking me for my zeal in the public service; and I was
informed that, as it might not be expedient to agitate in the town the
payment of the damage which my house had received, the lords of the
treasury would indemnify me for the same; and this was done in a manner
which showed the blessings we enjoy under our most venerable
constitution; for I was not only thereby enabled, by what I got, to
repair the windows, but to build up a vacant steading; the same which I
settled last year on my dochter, Marion, when she was married to Mr
Geery, of the Gatherton Holme.

CHAPTER XXII--THE WIG DINNER

The affair of the pressgang gave great concern to all of the council; for
it was thought that the loyalty of the burgh would be called in question,
and doubted by the king's ministers, notwithstanding our many assurances
to the contrary; the which sense and apprehension begat among us an
inordinate anxiety to manifest our principles on all expedient occasions.
In the doing of this, divers curious and comical things came to pass; but
the most comical of all was what happened at the Michaelmas dinner
following the riot.

The weather, for some days before, had been raw for that time of the
year, and Michaelmas-day was, both for wind and wet and cold, past
ordinar; in so much that we were obligated to have a large fire in the
council-chamber, where we dined. Round this fire, after drinking his
majesty's health and the other appropriate toasts, we were sitting as
cozy as could be; and every one the longer he sat, and the oftener his
glass visited the punch-bowl, waxed more and more royal, till everybody
was in a most hilarious temperament, singing songs and joining chorus
with the greatest cordiality.

It happened, among others of the company, there was a gash old carl, the
laird of Bodletonbrae, who was a very capital hand at a joke; and he,
chancing to notice that the whole of the magistrates and town-council
then present wore wigs, feigned to become out of all bounds with the
demonstrations of his devotion to king and country; and others that were
there, not wishing to appear any thing behind him in the same, vied in
their sprose of patriotism, and bragging in a manful manner of what, in
the hour of trial, they would be seen to do. Bodletonbrae was all the
time laughing in his sleeve at the way he was working them on, till at
last, after they had flung