en sic a
woman i' this warl'.'

'Hoot, Sandy!' said Robert, 'a body wad think she was tint (lost) and ye
had the cryin' o' her. Speyk laicher, man; she'll maybe hear ye. Is she
i' the inn there?'

'Ay is she,' answered Sandy. 'See sic a warl' o' kists as she's brocht
wi' her,' he continued, pointing towards the pile of luggage. 'Saw ye
ever sic a bourach (heap)? It jist blecks (beats) me to think what ae
body can du wi' sae mony kists. For I mayna doobt but there's something
or ither in ilka ane o' them. Naebody wad carry aboot toom (empty) kists
wi' them. I cannot mak' it oot.'

The boxes might well surprise Sandy, if we may draw any conclusions
from the fact that the sole implement of personal adornment which he
possessed was two inches of a broken comb, for which he had to search
when he happened to want it, in the drawer of his stool, among awls,
lumps of rosin for his violin, masses of the same substance wrought into
shoemaker's wax for his ends, and packets of boar's bristles, commonly
called birse, for the same.

'Are thae a' ae body's?' asked Robert.

'Troth are they. They're a' hers, I wat. Ye wad hae thocht she had been
gaein' to The Bothie; but gin she had been that, there wad hae been a
cairriage to meet her,' said Crookit Caumill, the ostler.

The Bothie was the name facetiously given by Alexander, Baron Rothie,
son of the Marquis of Boarshead, to a house he had built in the
neighbourhood, chiefly for the accommodation of his bachelor friends
from London during the shooting-season.

'Haud yer tongue, Caumill,' said the shoemaker. 'She's nae sic cattle,
yon.'

'Haud up the bit bowat (stable-lantern), man, and lat Robert here see
the direction upo' them. Maybe he'll mak' something o't. He's a fine
scholar, ye ken,' said another of the bystanders.

The ostler held the lantern to the card upon one of the boxes, but
Robert found only an M., followed by something not very definite, and a
J., which might have been an I., Rothieden, Driftshire, Scotland.

As he was not immediate with his answer, Peter Lumley, one of the
group, a lazy ne'er-do-weel, who had known better days, but never better
manners, and was seldom quite drunk, and seldomer still quite sober,
struck in with,

'Ye dinna ken a' thing yet, ye see, Robbie.'

From Sandy this would have been nothing but a good-humoured attempt at
facetiousness. From Lumley it meant spite, because Robert's praise was
in his ears.

'I dinna preten' to ken