of papers,
parchments, books, and nondescript trinkets and gewgaws, which seemed to
have little to recommend them, besides rust and the antiquity which it
indicates. In the midst of this wreck of ancient books and utensils,
with a gravity equal to Marius among the ruins of Carthage, sat a large
black cat, which, to a superstitious eye, might have presented the
genius loci, the tutelar demon of the apartment. The floor, as well
as the table and chairs, was overflowed by the same mare magnum of
miscellaneous trumpery, where it would have been as impossible to find
any individual article wanted, as to put it to any use when discovered.

Amid this medley, it was no easy matter to find one's way to a chair,
without stumbling over a prostrate folio, or the still more awkward
mischance of overturning some piece of Roman or ancient British pottery.
And, when the chair was attained, it had to be disencumbered, with a
careful hand, of engravings which might have received damage, and of
antique spurs and buckles, which would certainly have occasioned it
to any sudden occupant. Of this the Antiquary made Lovel particularly
aware, adding, that his friend, the Rev. Doctor Heavysterne from the
Low Countries, had sustained much injury by sitting down suddenly and
incautiously on three ancient calthrops, or craw-taes, which had been
lately dug up in the bog near Bannockburn, and which, dispersed by
Robert Bruce to lacerate the feet of the English chargers, came thus in
process of time to endamage the sitting part of a learned professor of
Utrecht.

Having at length fairly settled himself, and being nothing loath to make
inquiry concerning the strange objects around him, which his host was
equally ready, as far as possible, to explain, Lovel was introduced to a
large club, or bludgeon, with an iron spike at the end of it, which,
it seems, had been lately found in a field on the Monkbarns property,
adjacent to an old burying-ground. It had mightily the air of such
a stick as the Highland reapers use to walk with on their annual
peregrinations from their mountains; but Mr. Oldbuck was strongly
tempted to believe, that, as its shape was singular, it might have been
one of the clubs with which the monks armed their peasants in lieu of
more martial weapons,--whence, he observed, the villains were called
Colve-carles, or Kolb-kerls, that is, Clavigeri, or club-bearers. For
the truth of this custom, he quoted the chronicle of Antwerp and that