lightning, or a cat's
back. Such doings in an enlightened age and a civilized country!--in a
town where we have three kirks, a grammar school, a subscription library,
a ladies' benevolent society, a mechanics' institution, and a debating
club! My heart burned within me like dry tow; and I could mostly have
jumped up to the ceiling with vexation and anger--seeing as plain as a
pikestaff, though the simple woman did not, that it was the handiwork of
none other than our neighbour Reuben Cursecowl, the butcher. Dog on it,
it was too bad--it was a rascally transaction; so, come of it what would,
I could not find it in my heart to screen him. "I'll wager, however,"
said I, in a kind of off-hand way, not wishing exactly, ye observe, to be
seen in the business, "that it will have been running away with
beef-steaks, mutton-chops, sheep feet, or something else out of the
booth; and some of his prentice laddies may have come across its hind-
quarters accidentally with the cleaver."

"Mistake here, or mistake there," said the woman, her face growing as red
as the sleeve of a soldier's jacket, and her two eyes burning like live
coals--"'Od the butcher, but I'll butcher him, the nasty, ugly,
ill-faured vagabond; the thief-like, cruel, malicious, ill-hearted, down-
looking blackguard! He would go for to offer for to presume for to dare
to lay hands on an honest man's son's doug! It sets him weel, the
bloodthirsty Gehazi, the halinshaker ne'er-do-weel! I'll gie him sic a
redding up as he never had since the day his mother boor him!" Then
looting down to the poor bit beast, that was bleeding like a sheep--"Ay,
Puggie, man," she said in a doleful voice, "they've made ye an unco
fright; but I'll gie them up their fit for't; I'll show them, in a couple
of hurries, that they have catched a Tartar!"--and with that out went the
woman, paper parcel, leather-cap and all, randying like a tinkler from
Yetholm; the wee wretchie cowering behind her, with the mouse-wabs
sticking on the place I had put them to stop the bleeding; and looking,
by all the world, like a sight I once saw, when I was a boy, on a visit
to my father's half-cousin, Aunt Heatherwig, on the Castle-hill of
Edinburgh--to wit, a thief going down Leith Walk, on his road to be
shipped for transportation to Botany Bay, after having been pelted for a
couple of hours with rotten eggs in the pillory.

Knowing the nature of the parties concerned, and that intimately on both
sid