gher in the aversion of the papists than that brave, honest man, we
shall know by the reception he meets with what we ought to do."

So my grandfather, putting the letters in his bosom, retired from the
presence of the Earl, and by break of day reached the West-port and went
straight on to the Lord James Stuart's lodging in the Canongate. But,
though the household were astir, it was some time before he got
admittance, for their master was a young man of great method in all
things, and his chaplain was at the time reading the first prayers of
the morning, during which the doors were shut, and no one, however
urgent his business, could gain admission into that house while the
inmates were doing their homage to the King of kings.

CHAPTER XVII

As my grandfather, in the grey of the morning, was waiting in the
Canongate till the worship was over in the house of the Lord James
Stuart, he frequently rode up and down the street as far the
Luckenbooths and the Abbey's sanctuary siver, and his mind was at times
smitten with the remorse of pity when he saw, as the dawn advanced, the
numbers of poor labouring men that came up out of the closes and
gathered round the trone, abiding there to see who would come to hire
them for the day. But his compassion was soon changed into a frame of
thankfulness at the boundless variety of mercies which are dealt out to
the children of Adam, for he remarked, that, for the most part, these
poor men, whose sustenance was as precarious as that of the wild birds
of the air, were cheerful and jocund, many of them singing and whistling
as blithely as the lark, that carries the sweet incense of her melodious
songs in the censer of a sinless breast to the golden gates of the
morning.

Hitherto he had never noted, or much considered, the complicated cares
and trials wherewith the lot of man in every station is chequered and
environed; and when he heard those bondmen of hard labour, jocund after
sound slumbers and light suppers, laughing contemptuously as they beheld
the humiliating sight, which divers gallants and youngsters, courtiers
of the court, degraded with debauch, made of themselves as they stumbled
homeward, he thought there was surely more bliss in the cup that was
earned by the constancy of health and a willing mind, than in all the
possets and malvesia that the hoards of ages could procure. So he
composed his spirit, and inwardly made a vow to the Lord, that as soon
as the mighty