uch a motherly affection towards our bit callant, that sending him
abroad would have been the death of her.

To be sure, since these days--which, alas, and woe's me! are not
yesterday now, as my grey hair and wrinkled brow but too visibly remind
me--such ups and downs have taken place in the commercial world, that the
barber line has been clipped of its profits and shaved close, from a
patriotic competition among its members, like all the rest. Among other
things, hair-powder, which was used from the sweep on the lum-head to the
king on the throne, is only now in fashion with the Lords of Session and
valy-deshambles; and pig-tails have been cut off from the face of the
earth, root and branch. Nevertheless, as I have taken occasion to make
observation, the foundations of the cutting and shaving line are as sure
as that of the everlasting rocks; beards being likely to roughen, and
heads to require polling, as long as wood grows and water runs.

CHAPTER XXVII.--"PUGGIE, PUGGIE,"--A STORY WITHOUT A TAIL.

Saw ye Johnie coming? quo' she,
Saw ye Johnie coming?
Wi' his blue bonnet on his head,
And his doggie running.

_Old Ballad_.

The welfare of the human race and the improvement of society being my
chief aim, in this record of my sayings and doings through the pilgrimage
of life, I make bold at the instigation of Nanse, my worthy wife, to
record in black and white a remarkably curious thing, to which I was an
eyewitness in the course of nature. I have little reluctance to consent,
not only because the affair was not a little striking in itself--as the
reader will soon see--but because, like AEsop's Fables, it bears a good
moral at the end of it.

Many a time have I thought of the business alluded to, which happened to
take place in our fore-shop one bonny summer afternoon, when I was
selling a coallier wife, from the Marquis of Lothian's upper hill, a yard
of serge at our counter-side. At the time she came in, although busied
in reading an account of one of Buonaparte's battles in the Courant
newspaper, I observed at her foot a bonny wee doggie, with a bushy black
tail, of the dancing breed--that could sit on its hind-legs like a
squirrel, cast biscuit from its nose, and play a thousand other most
diverting tricks. Well, as I was saying, I saw the woman had a pride in
the bit creature--it was just a curiosity like--and had belonged to a
neighbour's son that volunteered out of the Ber