Redfern gowns will be unappreciated, and my Worth evening frocks worse
than wasted!"

"There are a few thousand medical students," I said encouragingly, "and
all the young advocates, and a sprinkling of military men--they know
Worth frocks."

"And," continued Salemina bitingly, "there will always be, even in an
intellectual city like Edinburgh, a few men who continue to escape
all the developing influences about them, and remain commonplace,
conventional manikins, devoted to dancing and flirting. Never fear, they
will find you!"

This sounds harsh, but nobody minds Salemina, least of all Francesca,
who well knows that she is the apple of that spinster's eye. But at
this moment Susanna opens the door (timorously, as if there might be a
panther behind it) and announces the cab (in the same tone in which she
would announce the beast); we pick up our draperies, and are whirled off
by the lamiter to dine with the Scottish nobility.

Chapter VI. Edinburgh society, past and present.

'Wha last beside his chair shall fa'
He is the king amang us three!'

It was the Princess Dashkoff who said, in the latter part of the
eighteenth century, that of all the societies of men of talent she
had met with in her travels, Edinburgh's was the first in point of
abilities.

One might make the same remark to-day, perhaps, and not depart widely
from the truth. One does not find, however, as many noted names as are
associated with the annals of the Cape and Poker Clubs or the Crochallan
Fencibles, those famous groups of famous men who met for relaxation (and
intoxication, I should think) at the old Isle of Man Arms or in Dawney's
Tavern in the Anchor Close. These groups included such shining lights
as Robert Fergusson the poet, and Adam Ferguson the historian and
philosopher, Gavin Wilson, Sir Henry Raeburn, David Hume, Erskine,
Lords Newton, Gillies, Monboddo, Hailes, Kames, Henry Mackenzie, and the
Ploughman Poet himself, who has kept alive the memory of the Crochallans
in many a jovial verse like that in which he describes Smellie, the
eccentric philosopher and printer:--

'Shrewd Willie Smellie to Crochallan came,
The old cocked hat, the grey surtout the same,
His bristling beard just rising in its might;
'Twas four long nights and days to shaving night';

or in the characteristic picture of William Dunbar, a wit of the time,
and the merriest of the Fencibles:--

'As I cam by Crochallan
I cann