plooin' wi'."

But Robert nevertheless grew and prospered all day, and dreamed at
night that he was the king, digging the pits for the English cavalry,
and covering them again with the treacherous turf. Somehow the dream
never went further. The field and the kingship would vanish and he only
remain, the same Robert Bruce, the general dealer, plotting still, but
in his own shop.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

Responsive to Mr Cupples's last words uttered from the brink of the pit
into which his spirit was sinking, and probably forgotten straightway,
Alec knocked at his door upon the Sunday evening, and entered. The
strange creature was sitting in the same position as before, looking as
if he had not risen since he spoke those words. But there was an
alteration in the place, a certain Sunday look about the room, which
Alec could not account for. The same caricatures jested from the walls;
the same tumbler of toddy was steaming on the table amidst the same
litter of books and papers covered with the same dust and marked with
the same circles from the bottoms of wet tumblers and glasses. The same
cutty-clay, of enviable blackness, reposed between the teeth of Mr
Cupples.

After he had been seated for a few moments, however, Alec all at once
discovered the source of the reformation-look of the place: Mr Cupples
had on a shirt-collar--clean and of imposing proportions. To this no
doubt was attached a shirt, but as there was no further sign of its
presence, it could not have affected the aspect of things. Although,
however, this shirt-collar was no doubt the chief cause of the change
of expression in the room, Alec, in the course of the evening,
discovered further signs of improvement in the local morals; one, that
the hearth had been cleared of a great heap of ashes, and now looked
modest and moderate as if belonging to an old maid's cottage, instead
of an old bachelor's garret; and another, that, upon the untidy table,
lay an open book of divinity, a volume of Gurnall's _Christian Armour_
namely, which I fear Mr Cupples had chosen more for its wit than its
devotion. While making these discoveries, Alec chanced to observe--he
was quick-eyed--that some of the dusty papers on the table were
scrawled over with the first amorphous appearance of metrical
composition. These moved his curiosity; for what kind of poetry could
the most unpoetic-looking Mr Cupples produce from that great head of
his with the lanky colourless hair?--