pportunity to
remark, that our family would swallow the bait? But, aha, he was off his
eggs there!

James and me were so tickled with Cursecowl's wild, outrageous, off-hand,
humoursome way of telling his crack, that, though sore with neighering,
none of the two of us ever thought of rising; Cursecowl chapping in first
one stoup, and then another, and birling the tankard round the table, as
if we had been drinking dub-water. I dare say I would never have got
away, had I not slipped out behind Lucky Thamson's back--for she was a
broad fat body, with a round-eared mutch, and a full-plaited check
apron--when she was drawing the sixth bottle of small beer, with her
corkscrew between her knees; Cursecowl lecturing away, at the dividual
moment, like a Glasgow professor, to James Batter, whose een were
gathering straws, on a pliskie he had once, in the course of trade,
played on a conceited body of a French sicknurse, by selling her a lump
of fat pork to make beef-tea of to her mistress, who was dwining in the
blue Beelzebubs.

Ohone, and woes me, for old Father Adam and the fall of man! Poor,
sober, good, honest James Batter was not, by a thousand miles, a match
for such company. Everything, however, has its moral, and the truth will
out. When Nanse and me were sitting at our breakfast next morning, we
heard from Benjie, who had been early up fishing for eels at the
water-side, that the whole town-talk was concerning the misfortunate
James Batter, who had been carried home, totally incapable, far in the
night, by Cursecowl and an Irish labourer--that sleeped in Widow
Thamson's garret--on a hand-barrow, borrowed from Maister Wiggie's
servant-lass, Jenny Jessamine.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR--JAMES BATTER & THE MAID OF DAMASCUS

On the morning after the debosh with Mr Cursecowl, my respected friend,
James Batter, the pattern of steadiness and sobriety, awoke in a terrible
pliskie. The decent man came to the use of his senses as from a trance,
and scarcely knew either where he was, or whether his head or heels were
uppermost. He found himself lying without his Kilmarnock, from which he
might have received deadly damage, being subject to the rheumatics in the
cuff of the neck; and everything about him was in a most fearful and
disjaskit state. It was a long time before he could, for the life of
him, bring his mind or memory to a sense of his condition, having still
on his corduroy trowsers, and his upper and under ve