n itself had some dreadful aspects and
elements as well as others incongruous and comical. The humorous fancy
might see something to smile at in the two grey-wigged bent old men
in long scarlet coats who went in front of the trumpeters, prepared
to clear the way if necessary (though a gust of shrewd wind would have
blown them off their feet), by means of the long-poled halberts they
carried; but this impression of the farcical was modified by the nature
of the body whereof they were the pioneers or advance guard.
Sleek magistrates and councillors in unaccustomed black suits and
silver-buckled shoes, the provost ermined at their head, showed the way
to the more actual, the more dignified embodiment of stern Scots law. At
least a score of wigs were there from the Parliament House of Edinburgh,
a score of dusty gowns, accustomed to sweep the lobbies of the Courts
of Session, gathered the sand of the burgh street, and in their
midst walked the representatives of that old feudal law at long-last
ostensibly abandoned, and of the common law of the land. Argyll was in
a demure equivalent for some Court costume, with a dark velvet coat, a
ribbon of the Thistle upon his shoulder, a sword upon his haunch, and
for all his sixty-six years he carried himself less like the lawyer made
at Utrecht--like Justice-General and Extraordinary Lord of Session--than
like the old soldier who had served with Marlborough and took the field
for the House of Hanover in 1715. My Lords Elchies and Kilkerran
walked on either side of him--Kilkerran with the lack-lustre eye of the
passionate mathematician, the studious moralist devoted to midnight oil,
a ruddy, tall, sturdy man, well filling the crimson and white silk gown;
Elchies, a shrivelled atomy with a hirpling walk, leaning heavily upon a
rattan, both with the sinister black tri-corne hats in their hands, and
flanked by a company of musketeers.

A great band of children lent the ludicrous element again to the company
by following close upon its heels, chanting a doggerel song to the tune
of the trumpets; the populace stood at the close-mouths or leaned over
their windows looking at the spectacle, wondering at the pomp given to
the punishment of a Stewart who a few years ago would have been sent to
the gallows by his Grace with no more formality than might have attended
the sentence of a kipper salmon-poacher to whipping at the hands of Long
Davie the dempster.

His Grace was entertaining the Lord