amazingly."

"Me'fiez vous, Monsieur Ipsden!" should some mentor have said.

As the Devil puts into a beginner's hands ace, queen, five trumps, to
give him a taste for whist, so these lower classes have perhaps put
forward one of their best cards to lead you into a false estimate of the
strength of their hand.

Instead, however, of this, who should return, to disturb the equilibrium
of truth, but this Christina Johnstone? She came thoughtfully in, and
said:

"I've been taking a thoucht, and this is no what yon gude physeecian
meaned; ye are no to fling your chaerity like a bane till a doeg; ye'll
gang yoursel to Jess Rutherford; Flucker Johnstone, that's my brother,
will convoy ye."

"But how is your brother to know me?"

"How? Because I'll gie him a sair sair hiding, if he lets ye gang by."

Then she returned the one-pound note, a fresh settlement was effected,
and she left him. At the door she said: "And I am muckle obleeged to ye
for your story and your goodness."

While uttering these words, she half kissed her hand to him, with a
lofty and disengaged gesture, such as one might expect from a queen, if
queens did not wear stays; and was gone.

When his lordship, a few minutes after, sauntered out for a stroll, the
first object he beheld was an exact human square, a handsome boy, with
a body swelled out apparently to the size of a man's, with blue flannel,
and blue cloth above it, leaning against a wall, with his hands in his
pockets--a statuette of _insouciance._

This marine puff-ball was Flucker Johnstone, aged fourteen.

Stain his sister's face with diluted walnut-juice, as they make the
stage gypsy and Red Indian (two animals imagined by actors to be one),
and you have Flucker's face.

A slight moral distinction remains, not to be so easily got over.

She was the best girl in the place, and he a baddish boy.

He was, however, as sharp in his way as she was intelligent in hers.

This youthful mariner allowed his lordship to pass him, and take twenty
steps, but watched him all the time, and compared him with a description
furnished him by his sister.

He then followed, and brought him to, as he called it.

"I daur say it's you I'm to convoy to yon auld faggitt!" said this
baddish boy.

On they went, Flucker rolling and pitching and yawing to keep up with
the lordly galley, for a fisherman's natural waddle is two miles an
hour.

At the very entrance of Newhaven, the new pilot suddenly sung o