e brass be not immaculate, certainly all will be to match--the
reflectors scratched, the spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the
storehouse. If a light is not rather more than middling good, it will be
radically bad. Mediocrity (except in literature) appears to be
unattainable by man. But of course the unfortunate of St. Andrews was
only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had no uniform coat, he
was, I believe, a plumber by his trade, and stood (in the mediaeval
phrase) quite out of the danger of my father; but he had a painful
interview for all that, and perspired extremely.

From St. Andrews we drove over Magus Muir. My father had announced we
were "to post," and the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions of
top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's "Dance of Death"; but it was
only a jingling cab that came to the inn door, such as I had driven in a
thousand times at the low price of one shilling on the streets of
Edinburgh. Beyond this disappointment, I remember nothing of that drive.
It is a road I have often travelled, and of not one of these journeys do
I remember any single trait. The fact has not been suffered to encroach
on the truth of the imagination. I still see Magus Muir two hundred
years ago: a desert place, quite unenclosed; in the midst, the primate's
carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in pursuit,
Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first. No scene of history has
ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, that
questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my own; not because of
the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not even because of the
live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe's 'bacco-box, thus clearly
indicating his complicity with Satan; nor merely because, as it was
after all a crime of a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday
books and afforded a grateful relief from "Ministering Children" or the
"Memoirs of Mrs. Katherine Winslowe." The figure that always fixed my
attention is that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with
his cloak about his mouth, and through all that long, bungling,
vociferous hurly-burly, revolving privately a case of conscience. He
would take no hand in the deed, because he had a private spite against
the victim, and "that action" must be sullied with no suggestion of a
worldly motive; on the other hand, "that action" in itself was highly
justified, he had cast in his lot with "the actor