to read in his library, so often
did not come home till late. But I stuck to my arm-chair and my
printer's slips like a burr to homespun. Suddenly there was a great
noise on the stairs. "There," cries Amelia, "that's one of your
countrymen, or I'm no judge of the Galloway bray!"

For, as I have indicated before, Amelia was far from imitating her
mother's English politeness.

The next moment the front door was driven in with a mighty brange
against the wall (for Amelia had been out the moment before on the
landing to throw some turnip-tops on the ash "backet"). A huge man in
many swathes of riding-coat dashed in and caught me by the throat.
Amelia had the two-pronged carving fork in her hand, and seeing her
mother's lodger (as she thought) in danger of being choked to death,
without having regulated his week's bill, she threw herself upon my
assailant and struck vehemently with the fork.

The huge man in the many capes doubtless suffered no grievous harm. It
had hardly been possible for a pistol-ball to penetrate such an
armature, but still the sudden assault from behind, and perhaps some
subtle feminine quality in Amelia's screams, made him turn about to see
what was happening.

The man was Fighting Anderson of Birkenbog himself, and he kept crying,
"Where have you hidden her, rascal, thief? I will kill you, villain of a
scribbler! It was because you were plotting this that you dare not show
your face in the country!"

But every time he threw himself upon me, Amelia, who did not want for
spunk, dug at him with the two-pronged fork, and stuck it through so
many plies of his mantle till he was obliged to cry out, "Here, lassie,
lay down that leister, or ye will hae me like miller Tamson's riddle,
that the cat can jump through back-foremost."

After adjusting his coat collar he turned to me and demanded, in a more
sensible and quiet way, what had become of his daughter.

At the question, Amelia went into one of her foolish fits of laughter
and cried out, "What, anither of them?"

Whereupon to prevent misunderstandings, I explained that the young lady
was my landlady's daughter, and a friend of Freddy Esquillant's.

"Oh, you students," he said, and sat down to wipe his brow, having seen
from the most cursory examination of our abode, wholly open to the view,
and exiguous at the best, that certainly Charlotte was not hidden there.

"She left home three days syne as if to go to Miss Huntingdon's," he
said, "and ev