using in a French prison on the bypast days of
Camperdown, and of Lord Rodney breaking through the line; with all their
fleets sunk to the bottom of the salt sea, after being raked fore and aft
with chain-shot; and our timber, sugar, tea and treacle merchants, all
fleeing for safety and succour down to lodgings in the Abbey Strand, with
a yellow stocking on the ae leg and a black one on the other, like a
wheen mountebanks. Little could they foresee, with their spentacles of
prophecy, that a battle of Waterloo would ever be fought, to make the
confounded fugies draw in their horns, and steek up their scraighing gabs
for ever. Poor fushionless creatures!

I do not pretend to be a politician,--having been bred to the tailoring
line syne ever I was a callant, and not seeing the Adverteezer
Newspapers, or the Edinburgh Evening Courant, save and except at an orra
time,--so I shall say no more, nor pretend to be one of the thousand-and-
one wise men, able and willing to direct his Majesty's Ministers on all
matters of importance regarding Church or State. One thing, howsoever, I
trust I ken, and that is, my duty to my King as his loyal subject, to old
Scotland as her unworthy son, and to my family as their prop, support,
and breadwinner;--so I shall stick to all three (under Heaven) as long as
I have a drop of blood in my precious veins. But the truth is--and I
will let it out and shame the de'il--that I could not help making these
general observations, (as Maister Wiggie calls the spiritualeezing of his
discourses,) as what I have to relate might well make my principles
suspected, were they not known to all the world to be as firm as the
foundations of the Bass Rock. Ye shall nevertheless judge for
yourselves.

It was sometime in the blasty month of March, the weather being rawish
and rainy, with sharp frosty nights that left all the window-soles
whitewashed over with frost rind in the mornings, that as I was going out
in the dark, before lying down in my bed, to give a look into the hen-
house, and lock the coal-cellar, so that I might hang the bit key on the
nail behind our room window-shutter, I happened to give a keek in, and,
lo and behold! the awful apparition of a man with a yellow jacket, lying
sound asleep on a great lump of parrot-coal in a corner!

In the first hurry of my terror and surprise, at seeing a man with a
yellow jacket and a green foraging cap in such a situation, I was like to
drop the good twope