dow and
come to bed."

"I am intoxicated with the caller air of Pettybaw," I rejoined,
leaning on the window-sill and looking at the stars, while I thought:
"Edinburgh was beautiful; it is the most beautiful gray city in the
world; it lacked one thing only to make it perfect, and Pettybaw will
have that before many moons.

'Oh, Willie's rare an' Willie's fair
An' Willie's wondrous bonny;
An' Willie's hecht to marry me
Gin e'er he marries ony.

'O gentle wind that bloweth south,
From where my love repaireth,
Convey a word from his dear mouth,
An' tell me how he fareth.'"

XV

"Gae tak' awa' the china plates,
Gae tak' them far frae me;
And bring to me a wooden dish,
It's that I'm best used wi'.
And tak' awa' thae siller spoons
The like I ne'er did see,
And bring to me the horn cutties,
They're good eneugh for me."

_Earl Richard's Wedding_.

The next day was one of the most cheerful and one of the most
fatiguing that I ever spent. Salemina and I moved every article of
furniture in our wee theekit hoosie from the place where it originally
stood to another and a better place: arguing, of course, over the
precise spot it should occupy, which was generally upstairs if the
thing were already down, or downstairs if it were already up. We hid
all the more hideous ornaments of the draper's wife, and folded away
her most objectionable tidies and table-covers, replacing them with
our own pretty draperies. There were only two pictures in the
sitting-room, and as an artist I would not have parted with them for
worlds. The first was The Life of a Fireman, which could only remind
one of the explosion of a mammoth tomato, and the other was The Spirit
of Poetry Calling Burns from the Plough. Burns wore white
knee-breeches, military boots, a splendid waistcoat with lace ruffles,
and carried a cocked hat. To have been so dressed he must have known
the Spirit was intending to come. The plough-horse was a magnificent
Arabian, whose tail swept the freshly furrowed earth, while the Spirit
of Poetry was issuing from a practicable wigwam on the left, and was a
lady of such ample dimensions that no poet would have dared say "no"
when she called him.

The dining-room was blighted by framed photographs of the draper's
relations and the draper's wife's relations; all uniformly ugly. (It
seems strange that married couples having the least beau