lergymen"--

"Ministers," interjected Salemina.

--"all ministers and professors. My Redfern gown will be
unappreciated, and my Worth evening frocks worse than wasted!"

"There are a few thousand medical students," I said encouragingly,
"and all the young advocates, and a sprinkling of military men,--they
know Worth frocks."

"And," continued Salemina bitingly, "there will always be, even in an
intellectual city like Edinburgh, a few men who continue to escape all
the developing influences about them, and remain commonplace,
conventional manikins, devoted to dancing and flirting. Never fear,
they will find you!"

This sounds harsh, but nobody minds Salemina, least of all Francesca,
who well knows she is the apple of that spinster's eye. But at this
moment Susanna opens the door (timorously, as if there might be a
panther behind it) and announces the cab (in the same tone in which
she would announce the beast); we pick up our draperies, and are
whirled off by the lamiter to dine with the Scottish nobility.

VI

It was the Princess Dashkoff who said, in the latter part of the
eighteenth century, that of all the societies of men of talent she had
met with in her travels, Edinburgh's was the first in point of
abilities.

One might make the same remark to-day, perhaps, and not depart widely
from the truth. One does not find, however, as many noted names as are
associated with the annals of the Cape and Poker Clubs or the
Crochallan Fencibles, those famous groups of famous men who met for
relaxation (and intoxication, I should think) at the old Isle of Man
Arms or in Dawney's Tavern in the Anchor Close. These groups included
such shining lights as Robert Fergusson the poet, and Adam Ferguson
the historian and philosopher, Gavin Wilson, Sir Henry Raeburn, David
Hume, Erskine, Lords Newton, Gillies, Monboddo, Hailes, Kames, Henry
Mackenzie, and the Ploughman Poet himself, who has kept alive the
memory of the Crochallans in many a jovial verse like that in which he
describes Smellie, the eccentric philosopher and printer:--

"Shrewd Willie Smellie to Crochallan came,
The old cocked hat, the grey surtout the same,
His bristling beard just rising in its might;
'Twas four long nights and days to shaving night;"

or in the characteristic picture of William Dunbar, a wit of the time,
and the merriest of the Fencibles:--

"As I cam by Crochallan
I cannily keekit ben;
Rattlin', roa