was
likely to go for nought, and me to be a ruined man; all the earnings of
my industry being laid out on my stock in trade, and on the plenishing of
our bit house. The darkness of the latter days came over my spirit like
a vision before the prophet Isaiah; and I could see nothing in the years
to come but beggary and starvation; myself a fallen-back old man, with an
out-at-the-elbows coat, a greasy hat, and a bald pow, hirpling over a
staff, requeeshting an awmous--Nanse a broken-hearted beggar wife, torn
down to tatters, and weeping like Rachel when she thought on better
days--and poor wee Benjie going from door to door with a meal-pock on his
back.

The thought first dung me stupid, and then drove me to desperation; and
not even minding the dear wife of my bosom, that had fainted away as dead
as a herring, I pulled on my trowsers like mad, and rushed out into the
street, bareheaded and barefoot as the day that Lucky Bringthereout
dragged me into the world.

The crowd saw in the twinkling of an eyeball that I was a desperate man,
fierce as Sir William Wallace, and not to be withstood by gentle or
semple. So most of them made way for me; they that tried to stop me
finding it a bad job, being heeled over from right to left, on the broad
of their backs, like flounders, without respect of age or person; some
old women that were obstrapulous being gey sore hurt, and one of them
with a pain in her hainch even to this day. When I had got almost to the
door-cheek of the burning house, I found one grupping me by the back like
grim death; and, in looking over my shoulder, who was it but Nanse
herself, that, rising up from her faint, had pursued me like a whirlwind.
It was a heavy trial, but my duty to myself in the first place, and to my
neighbours in the second, roused me up to withstand it; so, making a
spend like a greyhound, I left the hindside of my shirt in her grasp,
like Joseph's garment in the nieve of Potiphar's wife, and up the stairs
headforemost among the flames.

Mercy keep us all! what a sight for mortal man to glowr at with his
living eyes! The bells were tolling amid the dark, like a summons from
above for the parish of Dalkeith to pack off to another world; the drums
were beat-beating as if the French were coming, thousand on thousand, to
kill, slay, and devour every maid and mother's son of us; the fire-engine
pump-pump-pumping like daft, showering the water like rainbows, as if the
windows of heaven we