ake, and ever alive to all the interest
of the road; now joining in conversation with a passenger, shrewd,
sensible, and respectful; now exchanging a little elegant badinage with
the coachman; now bowing to a pretty girl; now quizzing a passer-by; he
was off and on his seat in an instant, and, in the whiff of his cigar,
would lock a wheel, or unlock a passenger.

From him the young Duke learned that his fellow-inside was Mr. Duncan
Macmorrogh, senior, a writer at Edinburgh, and, of course, the father of
the first man of the day. Tom Rawlins could not tell his Grace as much
about the principal writer in 'The Screw and Lever Review' as we can;
for Tom was no patron of our periodical literature, farther than a
police report in the Publican's Journal. Young Duncan Macmorrogh was a
limb of the law, who had just brought himself into notice by a series
of articles in 'The Screw and Lever,' in which he had subjected the
universe piecemeal to his critical analysis. Duncan Macmorrogh cut
up the creation, and got a name. His attack upon mountains was most
violent, and proved, by its personality, that he had come from the
Lowlands. He demonstrated the inutility of all elevation, and declared
that the Andes were the aristocracy of the globe. Rivers he rather
patronised; but flowers he quite pulled to pieces, and proved them to
be the most useless of existences. Duncan Macmorrogh informed us that we
were quite wrong in supposing ourselves to be the miracle of creation.
On the contrary, he avowed that already there were various pieces of
machinery of far more importance than man; and he had no doubt, in
time, that a superior race would arise, got by a steam-engine on a
spinning-jenny.

The other 'inside' was the widow of a former curate of a Northumbrian
village. Some friend had obtained for her only child a clerkship in
a public office, and for some time this idol of her heart had gone on
prospering; but unfortunately, of late, Charles Burnet had got into
a bad set, was now involved in a terrible scrape, and, as Tom Rawlins
feared, must lose his situation and go to ruin.

'She was half distracted when she heard it first, poor creature! I have
known her all my life, sir. Many the kind word and glass of ale I have
had at her house, and that's what makes me feel for her, you see. I
do what I can to make the journey easy to her, for it is a pull at her
years. God bless her! there is not a better body in this world; that I
will, say fo