its bonny muffed head in a corner.

But let alone likings, the callant was otherwise a loser in its death,
she having regularly laid a caller egg to him every morning, which he got
along with his tea and bread, to the no small benefit of his health,
being, as I have taken occasion to remark before, far from being
robusteous in the constitution. I am sure I know one thing, and that is,
that I would have willingly given the louns a crown-piece to have
preserved it alive, hen though it was of my own; but no--the bloody deed
was over and done, before we were aware that the poor thing's life was
sacrificed.

The names of the two Eirishers were John Dochart and Dennis Flint, both,
according to their own deponement, from the county of Tipperary; and weel-
a-wat the place has no great credit in producing two such bairns. Often,
after that, did I look through that part of the Advertizer newspapers,
that has a list of all the accidents, and so on, just above the births,
marriages, and deaths, which I liked to read regularly. Howsoever, it
was two years before I discovered their names again, having it seems,
during a great part of that period, lived under the forged name of Alias;
and I saw that they were both shipped off at Leith, for transportation to
some country called the Hulks, for being habit and repute thieves, and
for having made a practice of coining bad silver. The thing, however,
that condemned them, was for having knocked down a drunk man, in a
beastly state of intoxication, on the King's highway in broad daylight;
and having robbed him of his hat, wig, and neckcloth, an upper and under
vest, a coat and great-coat, a pair of Hessian boots which he had on his
legs, a silver watch with four brass seals and a key, besides a snuff-box
made of box-wood, with an invisible hinge, one of the Lawrencekirk breed,
a pair of specs, some odd halfpennies, and a Camperdown pocket-napkin.

But of all months of the year--or maybe, indeed, of my blessed
lifetime--this one was the most adventurous. It seemed, indeed, as if
some especial curse of Providence hung over the canny town of Dalkeith;
and that, like the great cities of the plain, we were at long and last to
be burnt up from the face of the earth with a shower of fire and
brimstone.

Just three days after the drumming of the two Eirish ne'er-do-weels, a
deaf and dumb woman came in prophesying at our back door, offering to
spae fortunes. She was tall and thin, an unco w