intner in Saint Ronan's."

We have only farther to notice Meg's mode of conducting herself towards
chance travellers, who, knowing nothing of nearer or more fashionable
accommodations, or perhaps consulting rather the state of their purse
than of their taste, stumbled upon her house of entertainment. Her
reception of these was as precarious as the hospitality of a savage
nation to sailors shipwrecked on their coast. If the guests seemed to
have made her mansion their free choice--or if she liked their
appearance (and her taste was very capricious)--above all, if they
seemed pleased with what they got, and little disposed to criticise or
give trouble, it was all very well. But if they had come to Saint
Ronan's because the house at the Well was full--or if she disliked what
the sailor calls the cut of their jib--or if, above all, they were
critical about their accommodations, none so likely as Meg to give them
what in her country is called a _sloan_. In fact, she reckoned such
persons a part of that ungenerous and ungrateful public, for whose sake
she was keeping her house open at a dead loss, and who had left her, as
it were, a victim to her patriotic zeal.

Hence arose the different reports concerning the little inn of Saint
Ronan's, which some favoured travellers praised as the neatest and most
comfortable old-fashioned house in Scotland, where you had good
attendance, and good cheer, at moderate rates; while others, less
fortunate, could only talk of the darkness of the rooms, the homeliness
of the old furniture, and the detestable bad humour of Meg Dods, the
landlady.

Reader, if you come from the more sunny side of the Tweed--or even if,
being a Scot, you have had the advantage to be born within the last
twenty-five years, you may be induced to think this portrait of Queen
Elizabeth, in Dame Quickly's piqued hat and green apron, somewhat
overcharged in the features. But I appeal to my own contemporaries, who
have known wheel-road, bridle-way, and footpath, for thirty years,
whether they do not, every one of them, remember Meg Dods--or somebody
very like her. Indeed, so much is this the case, that, about the period
I mention, I should have been afraid to have rambled from the Scottish
metropolis, in almost any direction, lest I had lighted upon some one of
the sisterhood of Dame Quickly, who might suspect me of having showed
her up to the public in the character of Meg Dods. At present, though it
is possible that