lth, sir.'

'And wha may your master be, friend?'

'What, the gentleman that was here? that's the famous Colonel Mannering,
sir, from the East Indies.'

'What, him we read of in the newspapers?'

'Ay, ay, just the same. It was he relieved Cuddieburn, and defended
Chingalore, and defeated the great Mahratta chief, Ram Jolli Bundleman. I
was with him in most of his campaigns.'

'Lord safe us,' said the landlady; 'I must go see what he would have for
supper; that I should set him down here!'

'O, he likes that all the better, mother. You never saw a plainer
creature in your life than our old Colonel; and yet he has a spice of the
devil in him too.'

The rest of the evening's conversation below stairs tending little to
edification, we shall, with the reader's leave, step up to the parlour.

CHAPTER XII
Reputation! that's man's idol
Set up against God, the Maker of all laws,
Who hath commanded us we should not kill,
And yet we say we must, for Reputation!
What honest man can either fear his own,
Or else will hurt another's reputation?
Fear to do base unworthy things is valour;
If they be done to us, to suffer them
Is valour too.

BEN JONSON.

The Colonel was walking pensively up and down the parlour when the
officious landlady reentered to take his commands. Having given them in
the manner he thought would be most acceptable 'for the good of the
house,' he begged to detain her a moment.

'I think,' he said, 'madam, if I understood the good people right, Mr.
Bertram lost his son in his fifth year?'

'O ay, sir, there's nae doubt o' that, though there are mony idle clashes
about the way and manner, for it's an auld story now, and everybody tells
it, as we were doing, their ain way by the ingleside. But lost the bairn
was in his fifth year, as your honour says, Colonel; and the news being
rashly tell'd to the leddy, then great with child, cost her her life that
samyn night; and the Laird never throve after that day, but was just
careless of everything, though, when his daughter Miss Lucy grew up, she
tried to keep order within doors; but what could she do, poor thing? So
now they're out of house and hauld.'

'Can you recollect, madam, about what time of the year the child was
lost?' The landlady, after a pause and some recollection, answered, 'she
was positive it was about this season'; and added some local
recollections that fixed the date