Then he added in a lower tone, "Doited old
hag! she's deaf as a post. I say, Mrs. Macleuchar!"

But Mrs. Macleuchar, the proprietress of the Queensferry diligence, was
in no hurry to face the wrath of the public. She served her customer
quietly in the shop below, ascended the stairs, and when at last on the
level of the street, she looked about, wiped her spectacles as if a mote
upon them might have caused her to overlook so minute an object as an
omnibus, and exclaimed, "Did ever anybody see the like o' this?"

"Yes, you abominable woman," cried the traveller, "many have seen the
like before, and all will yet see the like again, that have aught to do
with your trolloping sex!"

And walking up and down the pavement in front of Mrs. Macleuchar's
booth, he delivered a volley of abuse each time he came in front of it,
much as a battleship fires a broadside as she passes a hostile fortress,
till the good woman was quite overwhelmed.

"Oh! man! man!" she cried, "take back your three shillings and make me
quit o' ye!"

"Not so fast--not so fast," her enemy went on; "will three shillings
take me to Queensferry according to your deceitful programme? Or will it
pay my charges there, if, by your fault, I should be compelled to tarry
there a day for want of tide? Will it even hire me a pinnace, for which
the regular price is five shillings?"

But at that very moment the carriage lumbered up, and the two travellers
were carried off, the elder of them still leaning out of the window and
shouting reproaches at the erring Mrs. Macleuchar.

The slow pace of the broken-down horses, and the need to replace a shoe
at a wayside smithy, still further delayed the progress of the vehicle,
and when they arrived at Queensferry, the elder traveller, Mr. Jonathan
Oldbuck by name, saw at once, by the expanse of wet sand and the number
of the black glistening rocks visible along the shore, that the time of
tide was long past.

But he was less angry than his young companion, Mr. Lovel, had been led
to expect from the scolding he had bestowed upon Mrs. Macleuchar in the
city. On the way the two had discovered a kindred taste for antique
literature and the remains of the past, upon which last Mr. Jonathan
Oldbuck was willing to discourse, as the saying is, till all was blue.

The Hawes Inn sat (and still sits) close by the wash of the tides which
scour the Firth of Forth on its southern side. It was then an
old-fashioned hostelry, overgrown