o wear her through the winter.
They're queer deevils; as my auld father used to say, they're warst where
they're warst guided. After a', there's baith gude and ill about the
gipsies.'

This, and some other desultory conversation, served as a 'shoeing-horn'
to draw on another cup of ale and another 'cheerer,' as Dinmont termed it
in his country phrase, of brandy and water. Brown then resolutely
declined all further conviviality for that evening, pleading his own
weariness and the effects of the skirmish, being well aware that it would
have availed nothing to have remonstrated with his host on the danger
that excess might have occasioned to his own raw wound and bloody
coxcomb. A very small bed-room, but a very clean bed, received the
traveller, and the sheets made good the courteous vaunt of the hostess,
'that they would be as pleasant as he could find ony gate, for they were
washed wi' the fairy-well water, and bleached on the bonny white gowans,
and bittled by Nelly and herself, and what could woman, if she was a
queen, do mair for them?'

They indeed rivalled snow in whiteness, and had, besides, a pleasant
fragrance from the manner in which they had been bleached. Little Wasp,
after licking his master's hand to ask leave, couched himself on the
coverlet at his feet; and the traveller's senses were soon lost in
grateful oblivion.

CHAPTER XXV
Give ye, Britons, then,
Your sportive fury, pitiless to pour
Loose on the nightly robber of the fold.
Him from his craggy winding haunts unearth'd,
Let all the thunder of the chase pursue.

THOMSON'S Seasons.

Brown rose early in the morning and walked out to look at the
establishment of his new friend. All was rough and neglected in the
neighbourhood of the house;--a paltry garden, no pains taken to make the
vicinity dry or comfortable, and a total absence of all those little
neatnesses which give the eye so much pleasure in looking at an English
farm-house. There were, notwithstanding, evident signs that this arose
only from want of taste or ignorance, not from poverty or the negligence
which attends it. On the contrary, a noble cow-house, well filled with
good milk-cows, a feeding-house, with ten bullocks of the most approved
breed, a stable, with two good teams of horses, the appearance of
domestics active, industrious, and apparently contented with their lot;
in a word, an air of liberal though sluttish plenty indicated