ases, and pictures of Captain Barclay of Urie
walking to London and Mr. Ramsay of Barnton winning a horse-race, and
the three-volume edition of the Waverley Novels with many volumes
missing, and indeed all those things which an inn should have. Also
there used to be--there may still be--sound vintage claret in the
cellars. The Black Bull expects its guests to arrive in every stage of
dishevelment, and Dickson was received by a cordial landlord, who
offered dry garments as a matter of course. The pack proved to have
resisted the elements, and a suit of clothes and slippers were provided
by the house. Dickson, after a glass of toddy, wallowed in a hot bath,
which washed all the stiffness out of him. He had a fire in his
bedroom, beside which he wrote the opening passages of that diary he
had vowed to keep, descanting lyrically upon the joys of ill weather.
At seven o'clock, warm and satisfied in soul, and with his body clad in
raiment several sizes too large for it, he descended to dinner.

At one end of the long table in the dining-room sat a group of anglers.
They looked jovial fellows, and Dickson would fain have joined them;
but, having been fishing all day in the Lock o' the Threshes, they were
talking their own talk, and he feared that his admiration for Izaak
Walton did not qualify him to butt into the erudite discussions of
fishermen. The landlord seemed to think likewise, for he drew back a
chair for him at the other end, where sat a young man absorbed in a
book. Dickson gave him good evening, and got an abstracted reply. The
young man supped the Black Bull's excellent broth with one hand, and
with the other turned the pages of his volume. A glance convinced
Dickson that the work was French, a literature which did not interest
him. He knew little of the tongue and suspected it of impropriety.

Another guest entered and took the chair opposite the bookish young
man. He was also young--not more than thirty-three--and to Dickson's
eye was the kind of person he would have liked to resemble. He was tall
and free from any superfluous flesh; his face was lean, fine-drawn, and
deeply sunburnt, so that the hair above showed oddly pale; the hands
were brown and beautifully shaped, but the forearm revealed by the
loose cuffs of his shirt was as brawny as a blacksmith's. He had
rather pale blue eyes, which seemed to have looked much at the sun, and
a small moustache the colour of ripe hay. His voice was low and
pl