s as uplifted as a midden-cock upon
pattens."

Butler, it may readily be conceived, immediately obeyed the summons. He
was a plain character, in which worth and good sense and simplicity were
the principal ingredients; but love, on this occasion, gave him a certain
degree of address. He had received an intimation of the favour designed
him by the Duke of Argyle, with what feelings those only can conceive who
have experienced a sudden prospect of being raised to independence and
respect from penury and toil. He resolved, however, that the old man
should retain all the consequence of being, in his own opinion, the first
to communicate the important intelligence. At the same time, he also
determined that in the expected conference he would permit David Deans to
expatiate at length upon the proposal, in all its bearings, without
irritating him either by interruption or contradiction. This last was the
most prudent plan he could have adopted; because, although there were
many doubts which David Deans could himself clear up to his own
satisfaction, yet he might have been by no means disposed to accept the
solution of any other person; and to engage him in an argument would have
been certain to confirm him at once and for ever in the opinion which
Butler chanced to impugn.

He received his friend with an appearance of important gravity, which
real misfortune had long compelled him to lay aside, and which belonged
to those days of awful authority in which he predominated over Widow
Butler, and dictated the mode of cultivating the crofts of Beersheba. He
made known to Reuben, with great prolixity, the prospect of his changing
his present residence for the charge of the Duke of Argyle's stock-farm
in Dumbartonshire, and enumerated the various advantages of the situation
with obvious self-congratulation; but assured the patient hearer, that
nothing had so much moved him to acceptance, as the sense that, by his
skill in bestial, he could render the most important services to his
Grace the Duke of Argyle, to whom, "in the late unhappy circumstance"
(here a tear dimmed the sparkle of pride in the old man's eye), "he had
been sae muckle obliged."

"To put a rude Hielandman into sic a charge," he continued, "what could
be expected but that he suld be sic a chiefest herdsman, as wicked Doeg
the Edomite? whereas, while this grey head is to the fore, not a clute o'
them but sall be as weel cared for as if they were the fatted kine of
P