slush, she might get enough
of it at the fut o' the hill, without gaun to the tap."

"Weel, I'll no deny," said the older man, "but what it's daftlike, but
if it is her leddyship's pleasure, it's nae business o' oors."

"Pleasure!" said the youth: "if she ca's this pleasure, her friends
should see about shutting her up: it's time."

"She says the Romans once lived here," said John.

"If they did," Thomas said, "I daur say _they_ had mair sinse than sit
down to eat their dinner in the middle o' snaw if they had a house to
tak it in."

"Her leddyship does na' tak the cauld easy," said John.

"She has the constitution o' a horse," Thomas remarked.

"Man," said John, "that shows a' that ye ken about horses: there's no
a mair delicate beast on the face o' the earth than the horse. They
tell me a' the horses in London hae the influenza the now."

"Weel, it'll be our turn next," said Thomas, "if we dinna tak
something warm."

When luncheon was over her ladyship as often as not ordered her
servants to take the carriage round by the turnpike-road to a given
point, where she arranged to meet it, while she herself struck right
over the hills as the crow flies, crossing the burns on her way in the
same manner as the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, only the water did
not stand up on each side and leave dry ground for her to tread on;
but she ignored the water altogether, and walked straight through.
The young ladies, knowing this, took an extra supply of stockings and
shoes with them, but Lady Arthur despised such effeminate ways and
drove home in the footgear she set out in. She was a woman of robust
health, and having grown stout and elderly and red-faced, when out
on the tramp and divested of externals she might very well have been
taken for the eccentric landlady of a roadside inn or the mistress
of a luncheon-bar; and probably her young footman did not think she
answered to her own name at all.

There is a divinity that doth hedge a king, but it is the king's
wisdom to keep the hedge close and well trimmed and allow no gaps: if
there are gaps, people see through them and the illusion is destroyed.
Lady Arthur was not a heroine to her footman; and when she traversed
the snow-slush and walked right through the burns, he merely endorsed
the received opinion that she wanted "twopence of the shilling." If
she had been a poor woman and compelled to take such a journey in such
weather, people would have felt sorry for her