The deil's black collie worry my soul, but this
is a soople trick. I did nae think the sleekit sinner had art enough to
play't. Nae doubt he's gane to hide himsel in the town till I'm awa, for
he has heard what I said yestreen. But I'll be up sides wi' him. The
de'il a foot will I gang this morning till he comes back for his horse."
And with these words he turned out of the stable with the hostler and
went back to the house.

No sooner were they well gone than my grandfather came from his
hiding-place, and twisting a wisp of straw round his horse's feet, that
they might not dirl or make a din on the stones, he led it cannily out
and down to the river's brink, and, there mounting, took the ford, and
was soon free on the Gorbals side. Riding up the gait at a brisk trot,
he passed on for a short time along the road that he had been told led
to Kilmarnock, but fearing he would be followed, he turned off at the
first wynd he came to on the left, and a blessed thing it was that he
did so, for it led to the Reformation-leavened town of Paisley, where he
arrived an hour before daylight. Winterton, little jealousing what had
happened, went again to bed, as my grandfather afterwards learnt, and
had fallen asleep. In the morning when he awoke and was told that both
man and horse were flown, he flayed the hostler's back and legs in more
than a score of places, believing he had connived at my grandfather's
secret flight.

My grandfather had never before been in the town of Paisley, but he had
often heard from Abercorn's serving-men that were wont to sorn about his
father's smiddy, of a house of jovial entertainment by the water-side,
about a stone-cast from the abbey-yett, the hostess whereof was a
certain canty dame called Maggy Napier, then in great repute with the
shavelings of the abbey. Thither he directed his course, the abbey
towers serving him for her sign, and the moonlight and running river
were guides to her door, at the which he was not blate in chapping. She
was, however, long of giving entrance, for it happened that some nights
before the magistrates of the town had been at a carousal with the abbot
and chapter, the papistical denomination for the seven heads and ten
horns of a monastery, and when they had come away and were going home,
one of them, Bailie Pollock, a gaucy widower, was instigated by the
devil and the wine he had drunk to stravaig towards Maggy Napier's--a
most unseemly thing for a bailie to do--espec