the twinkling of an eyeball that I was a desperate man,
fierce as Sir William Wallace, and not to be withstood by gentle or
semple. So most of them made way for me; they that tried to stop me
finding it a bad job, being heeled over from right to left, on the broad
of their backs, like flounders without respect of age or person; some old
women that were obstrapulous being gey sore hurt, and one of them with a
pain in her hainch even to this day. When I had got almost to the
door-cheek of the burning house, I found one grupping me by the back like
grim death; and, in looking over my shoulder, who was it but Nanse
herself, that, rising up from her faint, had pursued me like a whirlwind.
It was a heavy trial, but my duty to myself in the first place, and to my
neighbours in the second, roused me up to withstand it; so, making a
spend like a grey-hound, I left the hindside of my shirt in her grasp,
like Joseph's garment in the nieve of Potiphar's wife, and up the stairs
head-foremost among the flames.

Mercy keep us all! what a sight for mortal man to glowr at with his
living eyes! The bells were tolling amid the dark, like a summons from
above for the parish of Dalkeith to pack off to another world; the drums
were beat-beating as if the French were coming, thousand on thousand, to
kill, slay, and devour every maid and mother's son of us; the fire-engine
pump-pump-pumping like daft, showering the water like rainbows, as if the
windows of heaven were opened, and the days of old Noah come back again;
and the rabble throwing the good furniture over the windows like onion
peelings, where it either felled the folk below, or was dung to a
thousand shivers on the causey. I cried to them, for the love of
goodness, to make search in the beds, in case there might be any weans
there, human life being still more precious than human means; but not a
living soul was seen but a cat, which, being raised and wild with the
din, would on no consideration allow itself to be catched. Jacob Dribble
found that to his cost; for, right or wrong, having a drappie in his
head, he swore like a trooper that he would catch her, and carry her down
beneath his oxter; so forward he weired her into a corner, crouching on
his hunkers. He had much better have left it alone; for it fuffed over
his shoulder like wildfire, and scarting his back all the way down,
jumped like a lamplighter head-foremost through the flames, where, in the
raging and roaring of