These things had their impression at
first, but we get used to grandeur by degrees. Well, sir!--Gad, I can
scarce get on with my story--it sticks in my throat--must take a trifle
to wash it down. Well, this dame had a daughter--Jess Cantrips, a
black-eyed, bouncing wench--and, as the devil would have it, there was
the d--d five-story stair--her foot was never from it, whether I went
out or came home from the Divinity Hall. I would have eschewed her,
sir--I would, on my soul; for I was as innocent a lad as ever came from
Lammermuir; but there was no possibility of escape, retreat, or flight,
unless I could have got a pair of wings, or made use of a ladder seven
stories high, to scale the window of my attic. It signifies little
talking--you may suppose how all this was to end--I would have married
the girl, and taken my chance--I would, by Heaven! for she was a pretty
girl, and a good girl, till she and I met; but you know the old song,
"Kirk would not let us be." A gentleman, in my case, would have settled
the matter with the kirk-treasurer for a small sum of money; but the
poor stibbler, the penniless dominie, having married his cousin of
Kittlebasket, must next have proclaimed her frailty to the whole parish,
by mounting the throne of Presbyterian penance, and proving, as Othello
says, "his love a whore," in face of the whole congregation.

'In this extremity I dared not stay where I was, and so thought to go
home to my father. But first I got Jack Radaway, a lad from the same
parish, and who lived in the same infernal stair, to make some inquiries
how the old gentleman had taken the matter. I soon, by way of answer,
learned, to the great increase of my comfortable reflections, that the
good old man made as much clamour as if such a thing as a man's eating
his wedding dinner without saying grace had never happened since Adam's
time. He did nothing for six days but cry out, "Ichabod, Ichabod, the
glory is departed from my house!" and on the seventh he preached a
sermon, in which he enlarged on this incident as illustrative of one of
the great occasions for humiliation, and causes of national defection. I
hope the course he took comforted himself--I am sure it made me ashamed
to show my nose at home. So I went down to Leith, and, exchanging my
hoddin grey coat of my mother's spinning for such a jacket as this, I
entered my name at the rendezvous as an able-bodied landsman, and
sailed with the tender round to Plymouth, whe