down. "Ha! ha! is that not good?" demanded the
Paymaster, laughing till his jowl purpled over his stock. "I told him he
would cross the bridge to Kilmalieu one day and instead of being last he
would be first."

The Fiscal hirpled along in his tight knee-breeches looking down with
vain satisfaction now and then at the ruffles of his shirt and the
box-pleated frills that were dressed very snodly and cunningly by
Bell Macniven, who had been in the Forty-second with her husband the
sergeant, and had dressed the shirts of the Marquis of Huntly, who was
Colonel.

"I have seldom, sir, seen a better dressed shirt," said Mr. William
Spencer, of the New Inn, who was a citizen of London and anxious to make
his way among the people here, "It is quite the style, quite the style,
sir."

"Do you think so, now?" asked the Fiscal, pleased at the compliment.

"I do, indeed," said Mr. Spencer, "it is very genteel and just as the
gentry like it."

The Fiscal coloured, turned and paused and fixed him with an angry eye.

"Do you speak to me of gentry, Mr. Spencer," he asked, "with any idea of
making distinctions? You are a poor Sassenach person, I daresay, and do
not know that my people have been in Blarinarn for three hundred years
and I am the first man-of-business in the family."

The innkeeper begged pardon. Poor man! he had much to learn of Highland
punctilio. He might be wanting in delicacy of this kind perhaps, but he
had the heart, and it was he, as they came in front of the glee'd gun
that stands on the castle lawn, who stopped to look back at a boy far
behind them, alone on the top of the bridge.

"Is there no one with the boy?" he asked. "And where is he to stay now
that his grandmother is dead?"

The Paymaster drew up as if he had been shot, and swore warmly to
himself.

"Am not I the _golan_?" said he. "I forgot about the fellow, and I told
the shepherd at Ladyfield to lock up the house till Whitsunday. I'm
putting the poor boy out in the world without a roof for his head. It
must be seen to, it must be seen to."

Rixa pompously blew out his cheeks and put back his shoulders in a way
he had to convince himself he was not getting old and round-backed.
"Oh," said he, "Jean Clerk's a relative; he'll be going to bide there."

They stood in a cluster in the middle of the road, the Paymaster with
his black coat so tight upon his stomach it looked as if every brass
button would burst with a crack like a gun; Rixa puffin