ur bairn?" demanded the magistrate.

"Wha am I?--wha suld I be, but Meg Murdockson, and wha suld my bairn be
but Magdalen Murdockson?--Your guard soldiers, and your constables, and
your officers, ken us weel eneugh when they rive the bits o' duds aff our
backs, and take what penny o' siller we hae, and harle us to the
Correctionhouse in Leith Wynd, and pettle us up wi' bread and water and
siclike sunkets."

"Who is she?" said the magistrate, looking round to some of his people.

"Other than a gude ane, sir," said one of the city officers, shrugging
his shoulders and smiling.

"Will ye say sae?" said the termagant, her eye gleaming with impotent
fury; "an I had ye amang the Figgat-Whins,* wadna I set my ten talents in
your wuzzent face for that very word?" and she suited the word to the
action, by spreading out a set of claws resembling those of St. George's
dragon on a country sign-post.

* [This was a name given to a tract of sand hillocks extending along the
sea-shore from Leith to Portobello, and which at this time were covered
with _whin_-bushes or furze.]

"What does she want here?" said the impatient magistrate--"Can she not
tell her business, or go away?"

"It's my bairn!--it's Magdalen Murdockson I'm wantin'," answered the
beldam, screaming at the highest pitch of her cracked and mistuned
voice--"havena I been telling ye sae this half-hour? And if ye are deaf,
what needs ye sit cockit up there, and keep folk scraughin' t'ye this
gate?"

"She wants her daughter, sir," said the same officer whose interference
had given the hag such offence before--"her daughter, who was taken up
last night--Madge Wildfire, as they ca' her."

"Madge Hellfire, as they ca' her!" echoed the beldam "and what business
has a blackguard like you to ca' an honest woman's bairn out o' her ain
name?"

"An _honest_ woman's bairn, Maggie?" answered the peace-officer, smiling
and shaking his head with an ironical emphasis on the adjective, and a
calmness calculated to provoke to madness the furious old shrew.

"If I am no honest now, I was honest ance," she replied; "and that's mair
than ye can say, ye born and bred thief, that never kend ither folks'
gear frae your ain since the day ye was cleckit. Honest, say ye?--ye
pykit your mother's pouch o' twalpennies Scots when ye were five years
auld, just as she was taking leave o' your father at the fit o' the
gallows."

"She has you there, George," said the assistants, and there was