ng him, in a couple of hurries, that it was necessary for him to be
our humble servant: so he said, still keeping the smirk on his face,
"Keh, keh, it's not worth making a noise about after all. Gie me the
jacket, Mansie, my man, and it'll maybe serve my nephew, young Killim,
who is as lingit in the waist as a wasp. Let us take a shake of your paw
over the counter, and be friends. Bye-ganes should be bye-ganes."

Never let it be said that Mansie Wauch, though one of the king's
volunteers, ever thrust aside the olive branch of peace; so ill-used
though I had been, to say nothing of James Batter, who had got his pipe
smashed to crunches, and one of the eyes of his spectacles knocked out, I
gave him my fist frankly.

James Batter's birse had been so fiercely put up, and no wonder, that it
was not so easily sleeked down; so, for a while, he looked unco glum,
till Cursecowl insisted that our meeting should not be a dry one; nor
would he hear a single word on me and James Batter not accepting his
treat of a mutchkin of Kilbagie.

I did not think James would have been so doure and refractory--funking
and flinging like old Jeroboam; but at last, with the persuasion of the
treat, he came to, and, sleeking down his front hair, we all three took a
step down to the far end of the close, at the back street, where Widow
Thamson kept the sign of "The Tankard and the Tappit Hen;" Cursecowl,
when we got ourselves seated, ordering in the spirits with a loud rap on
the table with his knuckles, and a whistle on the landlady through his
fore-teeth, that made the roof ring. A bottle of beer was also brought;
so, after drinking one another's healths round, with a tasting out of the
dram glass, Cursecowl swashed the rest of the raw creature into the
tankard, saying,--"Now take your will o't; there's drink fit for a king;
that's real 'Pap-in.'"

He was an awful body, Cursecowl, and had a power of queer stories, which,
weel-a-wat, did not lose in the telling. James Batter, beginning to
brighten up, hodged and leuch like a nine-year-old; and I freely confess,
for another, that I was so diverted, that, I dare say, had it not been
for his fearsome oaths, which made our very hair stand on end, and were
enough to open the stone-wall, we would have both sate from that time to
this.

We got the whole story of the Willie-goat, out and out; it seeming to be,
with Cursecowl, a prime matter of diversion, especially that part of it
relating to the