tch) per diem, until the
question of property was duly tried and debated. He even talked as if, in
strict and rigorous execution of his duty, he ought to detain honest
Andrew himself; but on my guide's most piteously entreating his
forbearance, he not only desisted from this proposal, but made a present
to Andrew of a broken-winded and spavined pony, in order to enable him to
pursue his journey. It is true, he qualified this act of generosity by
exacting from poor Andrew an absolute cession of his right and interest
in the gallant palfrey of Thorncliff Osbaldistone--a transference which
Mr. Touthope represented as of very little consequence, since his
unfortunate friend, as he facetiously observed, was likely to get nothing
of the mare excepting the halter.

Andrew seemed woeful and disconcerted, as I screwed out of him these
particulars; for his northern pride was cruelly pinched by being
compelled to admit that attorneys were attorneys on both sides of the
Tweed; and that Mr. Clerk Touthope was not a farthing more sterling coin
than Mr. Clerk Jobson.

"It wadna hae vexed him half sae muckle to hae been cheated out o' what
might amaist be said to be won with the peril o' his craig, had it
happened amang the Inglishers; but it was an unco thing to see hawks pike
out hawks' e'en, or ae kindly Scot cheat anither. But nae doubt things
were strangely changed in his country sin' the sad and sorrowfu' Union;"
an event to which Andrew referred every symptom of depravity or
degeneracy which he remarked among his countrymen, more especially the
inflammation of reckonings, the diminished size of pint-stoups, and other
grievances, which he pointed out to me during our journey.

For my own part, I held myself, as things had turned out, acquitted of
all charge of the mare, and wrote to my uncle the circumstances under
which she was carried into Scotland, concluding with informing him that
she was in the hands of justice, and her worthy representatives, Bailie
Trumbull and Mr. Clerk Touthope, to whom I referred him for farther
particulars. Whether the property returned to the Northumbrian
fox-hunter, or continued to bear the person of the Scottish attorney, it
is unnecessary for me at present to say.

We now pursued our journey to the north-westward, at a rate much slower
than that at which we had achieved our nocturnal retreat from England.
One chain of barren and uninteresting hills succeeded another, until the
more fertile val