t! I wad hae gien the best man
in the country the breadth o' his back gin he had gien me sic a kemping
as ye hae dune. What wad ye do?--Wad ye follow the wolf to his den? I
tell ye, man, he has the auld trap set for ye--He has got the
collector-creature Morris to bring up a' the auld story again,
and ye maun look for nae help frae me here, as ye got at Justice
Inglewood's;--it isna good for my health to come in the gate o' the
whigamore bailie bodies. Now gang your ways hame, like a gude
bairn--jouk and let the jaw gae by--Keep out o' sight o' Rashleigh, and
Morris, and that MacVittie animal--Mind the Clachan of Aberfoil, as I
said before, and by the word of a gentleman, I wunna see ye wranged. But
keep a calm sough till we meet again--I maun gae and get Rashleigh out
o' the town afore waur comes o't, for the neb o' him's never out o'
mischief--Mind the Clachan of Aberfoil."

He turned upon his heel, and left me to meditate on the singular events
which had befallen me. My first care was to adjust my dress and reassume
my cloak, disposing it so as to conceal the blood which flowed down my
right side. I had scarcely accomplished this, when, the classes of the
college being dismissed, the gardens began to be filled with parties of
the students. I therefore left them as soon as possible; and in my way
towards Mr. Jarvie's, whose dinner hour was now approaching, I stopped at
a small unpretending shop, the sign of which intimated the indweller to
be Christopher Neilson, surgeon and apothecary. I requested of a little
boy who was pounding some stuff in a mortar, that he would procure me an
audience of this learned pharmacopolist. He opened the door of the back
shop, where I found a lively elderly man, who shook his head
incredulously at some idle account I gave him of having been wounded
accidentally by the button breaking off my antagonist's foil while I was
engaged in a fencing match. When he had applied some lint and somewhat
else he thought proper to the trifling wound I had received, he
observed--"There never was button on the foil that made this hurt. Ah!
young blood! young blood!--But we surgeons are a secret generation--If
it werena for hot blood and ill blood, what wad become of the twa
learned faculties?"

With which moral reflection he dismissed me; and I experienced very
little pain or inconvenience afterwards from the scratch I had received.

CHAPTER NINTH.

An iron race the mountain-