and justice in which
they originate, had repeatedly prevented, by his benevolent and manly
exertions, the triumphs of selfish cunning over simplicity and folly.
He undertook my cause, with the assistance of a solicitor of a character
similar to his own. My quondam doer had ensconced himself chin-deep
among legal trenches, hornworks, and covered ways; but my two protectors
shelled him out of his defences, and I was at length a free man, at
liberty to go or stay wheresoever my mind listed.

I left my lodgings as hastily as if it had been a pest-house. I did not
even stop to receive some change that was due to me on settling with my
landlady, and I saw the poor woman stand at her door looking after my
precipitate flight, and shaking her head as she wrapped the silver which
she was counting for me in a separate piece of paper, apart from the
store in her own moleskin purse. An honest Highlandwoman was Janet
MacEvoy, and deserved a greater remuneration, had I possessed the power
of bestowing it. But my eagerness of delight was too extreme to pause
for explanation with Janet. On I pushed through the groups of children,
of whose sports I had been so often a lazy, lounging spectator. I sprung
over the gutter as if it had been the fatal Styx, and I a ghost, which,
eluding Pluto's authority, was making its escape from Limbo lake. My
friend had difficulty to restrain me from running like a madman up the
street; and in spite of his kindness and hospitality, which soothed me
for a day or two, I was not quite happy until I found myself aboard of
a Leith smack, and, standing down the Firth with a fair wind, might snap
my fingers at the retreating outline of Arthur's Seat, to the vicinity
of which I had been so long confined.

It is not my purpose to trace my future progress through life. I had
extricated myself, or rather had been freed by my friends, from the
brambles and thickets of the law; but, as befell the sheep in the
fable, a great part of my fleece was left behind me. Something remained,
however: I was in the season for exertion, and, as my good mother used
to say, there was always life for living folk. Stern necessity gave my
manhood that prudence which my youth was a stranger to. I faced danger,
I endured fatigue, I sought foreign climates, and proved that I belonged
to the nation which is proverbially patient of labour and prodigal of
life. Independence, like liberty to Virgil's shepherd, came late, but
came at last, with