ll be no means
To take away from me my breath in future.
Old Play.

By dint of charity from the town's-people in aid of the load of
provisions he had brought with him into durance, Edie Ochiltree had
passed a day or two's confinement without much impatience, regretting
his want of freedom the less, as the weather proved broken and rainy.

"The prison," he said, "wasna sae dooms bad a place as it was ca'd. Ye
had aye a good roof ower your head to fend aff the weather, and, if the
windows werena glazed, it was the mair airy and pleasant for the summer
season. And there were folk enow to crack wi', and he had bread eneugh
to eat, and what need he fash himsell about the rest o't?"

The courage of our philosophical mendicant began, however, to abate,
when the sunbeams shone fair on the rusty bars of his grated dungeon,
and a miserable linnet, whose cage some poor debtor had obtained
permission to attach to the window, began to greet them with his
whistle.

"Ye're in better spirits than I am," said Edie, addressing the bird,
"for I can neither whistle nor sing for thinking o' the bonny burnsides
and green shaws that I should hae been dandering beside in weather like
this. But hae--there's some crumbs t'ye, an ye are sae merry; and troth
ye hae some reason to sing an ye kent it, for your cage comes by nae
faut o' your ain, and I may thank mysell that I am closed up in this
weary place."

Ochiltree's soliloquy was disturbed by a peace-officer, who came to
summon him to attend the magistrate. So he set forth in awful procession
between two poor creatures, neither of them so stout as he was himself,
to be conducted into the presence of inquisitorial justice. The people,
as the aged prisoner was led along by his decrepit guards, exclaimed to
each other, "Eh! see sic a grey-haired man as that is, to have
committed a highway robbery, wi' ae fit in the grave!"--And the children
congratulated the officers, objects of their alternate dread and
sport, Puggie Orrock and Jock Ormston, on having a prisoner as old as
themselves.

Thus marshalled forward, Edie was presented (by no means for the first
time) before the worshipful Bailie Littlejohn, who, contrary to what his
name expressed, was a tall portly magistrate, on whom corporation
crusts had not been conferred in vain. He was a zealous loyalist of that
zealous time, somewhat rigorous and peremptory in the execution of