ng under some
plausible pretext. In the anxiety which he felt on this occasion, he had
held communication with an old acquaintance, Peter Drudgeit, with whom
the reader is partly acquainted. 'Alan,' he said, 'was ance wud, and
ay waur; and he was expecting every moment when he would start off in a
wildgoose-chase after the callant Latimer; Will Sampson, the horse-hirer
in Candlemaker Row, had given him a hint that Alan had been looking for
a good hack, to go to the country for a few days. And then to oppose
him downright--he could not but think on the way his poor mother was
removed. Would to Heaven he was yoked to some tight piece of business,
no matter whether well or ill paid, but some job that would hamshackle
him at least until the courts rose, if it were but for decency's sake.'

Peter Drudgeit sympathized, for Peter had a son, who, reason or none,
would needs exchange the torn and inky fustian sleeves for the blue
jacket and white lapelle; and he suggested, as the reader knows, the
engaging our friend Alan in the matter of Poor Peter Peebles, just
opened by the desertion of young Dumtoustie, whose defection would be at
the same time concealed; and this, Drudgeit said, 'would be felling two
dogs with one stone.'

With these explanations, the reader will hold a man of the elder
Fairford's sense and experience free from the hazardous and impatient
curiosity with which boys fling a puppy into a deep pond, merely to see
if the creature can swim. However confident in his son's talents, which
were really considerable, he would have been very sorry to have involved
him in the duty of pleading a complicated and difficult case, upon
his very first appearance at the bar, had he not resorted to it as an
effectual way to prevent the young man from taking a step which his
habits of thinking represented as a most fatal one at his outset of
life.

Betwixt two evils, Mr. Fairford chose that which was in his own
apprehension the least; and, like a brave officer sending forth his son
to battle, rather chose he should die upon the breach, than desert the
conflict with dishonour. Neither did he leave him to his own unassisted
energies. Like Alpheus preceding Hercules, he himself encountered the
Augean mass of Peter Peebles' law-matters. It was to the old man a
labour of love to place in a clear and undistorted view the real merits
of this case, which the carelessness and blunders of Peter's former
solicitors had converted into a h