fe like me buys her pickle sneeshin, or her drap
brandy-wine, to haud her heart up?"

Having thus extricated herself from her supposed false step, Dame
Loup-the-Dyke proceeded, during the rest of the evening, to supply, with
great animation, and very little assistance from her guests, the funds
necessary for the support of the conversation, until, declining any
further circulation of their glass, her guests requested her permission
to retire to their apartments.

The Marquis occupied the chamber of dais, which, in every house above
the rank of a mere cottage, was kept sacred for such high occasions as
the present. The modern finishing with plaster was then unknown, and
tapestry was confined to the houses of the nobility and superior gentry.
The cooper, therefore, who was a man of some vanity, as well as some
wealth, had imitated the fashion observed by the inferior landholders
and clergy, who usually ornamented their state apartments with hangings
of a sort of stamped leather, manufactured in the Netherlands, garnished
with trees and animals executed in copper foil, and with many a pithy
sentence of morality, which, although couched in Low Dutch, were perhaps
as much attended to in practice as if written in broad Scotch. The
whole had somewhat of a gloomy aspect; but the fire, composed of
old pitch-barrel staves, blazed merrily up the chimney; the bed was
decorated with linen of most fresh and dazzling whiteness, which had
never before been used, and might, perhaps, have never been used at
all, but for this high occasion. On the toilette beside, stood an
old-fashioned mirror, in a fillagree frame, part of the dispersed finery
of the neighbouring castle. It was flanked by a long-necked bottle of
Florence wine, by which stood a glass nearly as tall, resembling
in shape that which Teniers usually places in the hands of his own
portrait, when he paints himself as mingling in the revels of a country
village. To counterbalance those foreign sentinels, there mounted guard
on the other side of the mirror two stout warders of Scottish lineage;
a jug, namely, of double ale, which held a Scotch pint, and a quaigh,
or bicker, of ivory and ebony, hooped with silver, the work of
John Girder's own hands, and the pride of his heart. Besides these
preparations against thirst, there was a goodly diet-loaf, or sweet
cake; so that, with such auxiliaries, the apartment seemed victualled
against a siege of two or three days.

It only rema