e mean time, but return on the evening of the
ball, and conceal myself in a private apartment of the Saracen, where the
ball was to be held. Mackinnon was to attend the ball, and lead Mary to
the supper-room, from which the retreat could be easily effected. Cutts
was to remain below, look after the horses, and act as general spy.
Nothing more seemed necessary than to make Miss Morgan aware of our plans;
which the Saxon undertook to do by agency of his fair and larking friend,
who was in perfect ecstasies at the prospect of this coming elopement.

The eventful Friday arrived; and from a solitary bed-room in the third
floor of the Saracen, I heard the caterwauling of fiddles announce the
opening of the ball. I had asked Cutts to take a quiet chop with me
up-stairs, but that mercurial gentleman positively refused, upon the
ground of expediency. Nothing on earth could induce him to leave his post.
He was to act the spy, and therefore it was absolutely necessary that he
should remain below. All my remonstrances could not prevent him from
dining with Mackinnon in the coffee-room; so I was compelled to give him
his own way, merely extracting a pledge that for this once he would
abstain from unbounded potations. Down went the two gentlemen, and I was
left alone to my solitary meditations.

I have read Victor Hugo's _Dernier Jour d'un Condamne_, but I do not
recollect, in the course of my literary researches, having met with any
accurate journal of a gentleman's sensations before perpetrating an
elopement. It is a thing that could easily be done at a moment's notice,
but the case seems very different after the calm contemplation of a week.
You begin, then, to calculate the results. Fancy takes a leap beyond the
honeymoon, and dim apparitions of bakers' bills, and the skeletons of
cheap furniture, obtrude themselves involuntarily on your view. I lay down
on the bed, and tried to sleep until I should receive the appointed
signal. For some time it would not do. The nightmare, in the form of a
nurse with ponderous twins, sat deliberately down upon my chest, and
requested one of them, a hideous red-haired little imp, to kiss its dear
Papa! At last, however, I succeeded.

In the mean time Messrs Cutts and Mackinnon sat down to their frugal
banquet in the coffee-room. A glass of sherry after soup is allowed to the
merest anchorite, therefore my friends opined that they could not do less
than order a bottle. After fish, Mackinnon disco