heel, came in, and with a lantern bearer behind him, stood
looking at us. The two young lassies, Margaret and Agnes, sat in a
corner clasping one another's hands, and a very old woman sat near me
with her head clasped in her hands. She never looked up so long as I saw
her, and seemed to have quite lost both interest and hope.

I knew that the big man with the cloak was the Laird of Lag, for once
with my father I had seen him on the street at Kirkcudbright, when he
spoke us fairly enough--the matter one of cattle and crops belike.

"Whom have we here," he said, "coming so late by the window to see the
lassies? Young Whiggie, this is not proper wark; but who may you be?"

I sat and said nothing.

"Stell him up," he said, "and let us see what like this breaker of
maidens' chambers may be."

But I stood up of my own accord, with my hand on the prison wall.

Then he appeared to recognise me, for he said sourly:

"Ye'll be an Earlstoun Gordon, nae doot--ye favour the breed--though
there's mair of the lawyer Hope nor the fechtin' Gordon aboot you. I
hadna thocht ye had as muckle spunk."

Then he ordered two soldiers to stand guard over the hole on the
outside, and, setting a double guard on the Tolbooth, he cried, "Have
young Gordon forth to my quarters." Which when they did, he entertained
himself for several hours telling me how he would send me with the
utmost care to Edinburgh, and of the newly imported tortures that would
be inflicted on Sandy and myself. He said that Sandy was to be tortured
and that he had seen the precept from London with the order.

"So ye'll juist be in time to try on the new 'boot.' There's a fine braw
new-fangled pattern wi' spikes, and I hear that the new thumbikins are
excellently persuasive. Faith, they hae widened many a Whig's thrapple
already, and made it braw and wide in the swallow!"

Then, adding all the time cup to cup, he fell to cursing me and all our
house, not letting even my mother alone, till I said to him:

"John Graham had not treated a prisoner so. Nor you, Robert Grierson, if
you thought that my kinsman Kenmure was at hand to strike his sword
through your body--as once he came near doing in the street of
Kirkcudbright in the matter of bell of Whiteside!"

Now this (as I knew) was a saying which angered him exceedingly, and he
was for having out a file of soldiers and shooting me there and then.
But luckily Winram came in to say that the other assailants of the
Tolbo