solely
by way of encouragement. The laird's own jests, in the meanwhile, were
eminently successful, not only with the provost and his lady, but with
the red-cheeked and red-ribboned servant-maid who waited at table, and
who could scarce perform her duty with propriety, so effectual were the
explosions of Summertrees. Alan Fairford alone was unmoved among all
this mirth; which was the less wonderful, that, besides the important
subject which occupied his thoughts, most of the laird's good things
consisted in sly allusions to little parochial or family incidents,
with which the Edinburgh visitor was totally unacquainted: so that the
laughter of the party sounded in his ear like the idle crackling of
thorns under the pot, with this difference, that they did not accompany
or second any such useful operation as the boiling thereof.

Fairford was glad when the cloth was withdrawn; and when Provost Crosbie
(not without some points of advice from his lady touching the precise
mixture of the ingredients) had accomplished the compounding of a noble
bowl of punch, at which the old Jacobite's eyes seemed to glisten, the
glasses were pushed round it, filled, and withdrawn each by its owner,
when the provost emphatically named the toast, 'The King,' with an
important look to Fairford, which seemed to say, You can have no doubt
whom I mean, and therefore there is no occasion to particularize the
individual.

Summertrees repeated the toast, with a sly wink to the lady, while
Fairford drank his glass in silence.

'Well, young advocate,' said the landed proprietor, 'I am glad to see
there is some shame, if there is little honesty, left in the Faculty.
Some of your black gowns, nowadays, have as little of the one as of the
other.'

'At least, sir,' replied Mr. Fairford, 'I am so much of a lawyer as not
willingly to enter into disputes which I am not retained to support--it
would be but throwing away both time and argument.'

'Come, come,' said the lady, 'we will have no argument in this house
about Whig or Tory--the provost kens what he maun SAY, and I ken what he
should THINK; and for a' that has come and gane yet, there may be a time
coming when honest men may say what they think, whether they be provosts
or not.'

'D'ye hear that, provost?' said Summertrees; 'your wife's a witch, man;
you should nail a horseshoe on your chamber door--Ha, ha, ha!'

This sally did not take quite so well as former efforts of the laird's
wit. The