to slip a guinea into his hand.

"Lord bless your honour!" said the old man; "it's a young soldier's
gift, and it should surely thrive wi' an auld ane. I'se no refuse it,
though it's beyond my rules; for if they steek me up here, my friends
are like eneugh to forget me--out o'sight out o'mind, is a true proverb;
and it wadna be creditable for me, that am the king's bedesman, and
entitled to beg by word of mouth, to be fishing for bawbees out at the
jail window wi' the fit o' a stocking, and a string." As he made this
observation he was conducted out of the apartment.

Mr. Dousterswivel's declaration contained an exaggerated account of the
violence he had sustained, and also of his loss.

"But what I should have liked to have asked him," said Monkbarns, "would
have been his purpose in frequenting the ruins of St. Ruth, so lonely
a place, at such an hour, and with such a companion as Edie Ochiltree.
There is no road lies that way, and I do not conceive a mere passion for
the picturesque would carry the German thither in such a night of storm
and wind. Depend upon it, he has been about some roguery, and in all
probability hath been caught in a trap of his own setting--Nec lex
justitior ulla."

The magistrate allowed there was something mysterious in that
circumstance, and apologized for not pressing Dousterswivel, as his
declaration was voluntarily emitted. But for the support of the main
charge, he showed the declaration of the Aikwoods concerning the state
in which Dousterswivel was found, and establishing the important fact
that the mendicant had left the barn in which he was quartered, and did
not return to it again. Two people belonging to the Fairport undertaker,
who had that night been employed in attending the funeral of Lady
Glenallan, had also given declarations, that, being sent to pursue
two suspicious persons who left the ruins of St. Ruth as the funeral
approached, and who, it was supposed, might have been pillaging some
of the ornaments prepared for the ceremony, they had lost and regained
sight of them more than once, owing to the nature of the ground, which
was unfavourable for riding, but had at length fairly lodged them both
in Mucklebackit's cottage. And one of the men added, that "he, the
declarant, having dismounted from his horse, and gone close up to
the window of the hut, he saw the old Blue-Gown and young Steenie
Mucklebackit, with others, eating and drinking in the inside, and
also observed