(Continued from page 399.)
"You can tell well eneugh, if you have not heard
already, Mistress Euphame. You would ne'er have sat down with your
kerchief at your een, and the other hand in your lap in sic a strait,
and that is the reason I put this confidence in you. I am aware the
facts might still draw down the vengeance of the law; but what care I?
Lass, I never was feared, save for sin. They cannot harm a hair of Jock
Kerr's head, and I am not ashamed of the deed; I am aye a proud woman
when I think that I was counted worthy to free my father. I telled
nobody. I was in Edinburgh out of my friend's sight, and I kenned that
I, a woman, a young lass, would not be lightly suspected. I got out
my Galloway pony that had been sic a pet at Ochiltree, and I rode
off ere break of day one summer morning, as a young serving woman,
journeying to see her mother who dwelt upon the Borders. I pricked on
alane in the heat and the drought, for I could not eat, and I dared not
stop and bid them fill up the stirrup-cup; and I only paused to bait and
sleep once at a canny country inn for two long days, till I reached the
bien house of my faithful auld English nurse, Betty Langton, close by
Berwick. I kenned that conter me who would, Betty Langton would never
inform upon her darling, and that she would aid me, if mortal would back
a lass in sic an enterprise; and though English Betty grat and wrung her
hands, and was hard on the unlawfulness as well as the danger of the
attempt, she took me in and fed me, and what was better, she lent me the
Sabbath-day clothes of the slip of a lad, her son; and I had carried
pistols hidden at my holster, and a wrap-rascal rolled up and fastened
to my saddle, all the way from Edinburgh. I was troubled about my
height; though I'm brisk eneugh, I'm no more than a snod cummer. I have
not your stature, Mistress Euphame."
"And I may not have your brave spirit, madam." "Na,
never tell me that, Mistress Euphame. I've heard of the guse dub and the
callant. I trusted to night, and the man's drousiness, and aboon all, to
Heaven, though I was breaking the law of this poor down-trodden
Scotland. I cannot say that the guilt ever sat heavily on my conscience.
I spurred on again, a bonny boy, by the light of the moon, in the
fashion of the old moss-troopers, and I never rested till I arrived at
the change-house near Belford, where the postman from Durham took his
two or three hours' sleep, poor man. Wow, but the Luckie who served me
was couthie and kind, and little did she dream that she was entertaining
a footpad with bloom on his cheeks, and no down on his chin. I could
have spoken the hearty Luckie fair, and blinked her hawk's een; but, O
Euphame, the man sleepit, and his bag was stowed safe beneath his round
black head, and he had a strong arm doubled under him, gripping it all
the time. The whole that I could effect with my guile was to draw the
loading from his pistols, when I had sent the Luckie on an errand from
the room, and start anew ere the sleeper awakened.[Scottish Traditionary
Stories.] I took a turn through the ploughed land, over ditches and
hedges like a witch on her broomstick, and then resumed the great road
to Berwick, and drew up beneath a tree to keep my appointment and await
my fellow. A mist sprang up and hid the moon, but my heart was so hot
within me, that I never found the night-wind snell, only it seemed hours
instead of minutes till the carrier rode in sight with the mail from the
capital. There was no escort—men were otherwise engaged, and besides,
some of the gentlemen of the road had been arrested in the act, and were
exposed as a warning a mile further on. I but pressed my beast forward,
and cried, ' stand and deliver.' The man started, and swerved, and
cocked his pistol, and fired with a flash in the pan. In his wonder, he
dropped the other pistol, and then in his rage, he sprang from his
horse, and tried to seize me, but I dashed beyond his. reach, and I
screamed, ' Do you want a bullet in your brain, you loon, from ilka side
of the hedge ?' And if I had been foiled, I believe, Euphame, the very
twigs and boughs would have fought for a wild thing robbed of her
father, and driven to so wild a resource. And the wit was given me to,
catch his horse by the bridle, and ride off with the double charge, and
the mail bag strapped securely to the pack-saddle. What remained ? The
hireling was faithless to his trust, and fled; and I was let carry away
the spoil, black with the false witness of traitor statesmen, and fatal
to the as menacing the periled existence of my dear father, whom I
reverenced as the best of men.
"I bore my booty ayont the first hill, and there I
struck a light in my lantern, and slit the wallet and searched as for
life—life? it was death—and here was the official paper commanding to
hang and quarter the rogue Sir John Cochrane of Ochiltree. Soon I had
the fell thing in my hands, and I tore it with my fingers, and I bit it
with my teeth, and I crushed it under my nails, and I befouled the
fragments with clay, though they showed the handwriting of a king.
"Euphame, I hope no innocent man was afflicted by the
detention of the mail that night, no careful woman doomed to mourn, no
hapless unconscious bairn wronged, for I was a happy woman when my nurse
Betty Langton, with trembling haste, exchanged her lad's suit for my
woman's gear, and I jogged back to Edinburgh very weary in body, but
greatly lightened in spirit; and ere the next mail fell due, Sir John
was a pardoned man. Now, Mrs Euphame, do you not marvel that Jock Kerr,
so alert in limb and ready at the call of honour, friendship, and
religion, though he be slow in parts—I would rather have a gallant
dullard like my braw Jock Kerr, than a heckler and a laggard like
learned George Logan—natheless, I do not question his honesty, and I
hope I can admire and vaunt my ain bird without plucking the plumes of
my neighbours; but anent Jock Kerr and me, do you not ask yourself at
this moment, if he did not fear to offer me the perch of his house-dove
? Say, ' Ay,' frankly, Euphame, not 'I cannot tell, madam,' doucely."
"But I can tell—that is, I would not have been
feared, Lady Morriston, if I had been he."
"Bide you, lass, you must be feigning, or else I
doubt you must have a bauld spirit yoursel'. But mind, Mistress Euphame,
he has never half forgiven me that I did not employ him on the business,
though I vow, Mistress, at that hour of our regard we had niffered no
more than a bow and a curtsey, and maybe a backward look and a secret
sigh."
PART III.
I.
A day's events brought an end to Euphame Napier's
sojourn at Ormeslaw, as any day's circle may alter the current of our
lives. Lady Ormeslaw's chairs were not completed, and she was planning
how Euphame was to reel to her dame's wheel during the long winter
nights, and conclude her tent-stitch in the summer days, when a courier
came down from London to summon Master George to a post under an
influential statesman, whose acquaintance he had made, and whose good
graces he had won in the course of his famous visit to town. It was a
transition period; Anne, stout in form, childless, weak of will, and
breaking up both in body and mind, a very pitiable spectacle—an
oppressed, misled, bewildered, wellnigh betrayed woman, had escaped from
the snares laid for her, suddenly, at last; and suddenly George of
Hanover was proclaimed—the provinces were surprised into acknowledging
their German King—discontent was only muttering in the distance. The
appointment was a great honour to Master George, and it quite upset the
equilibrium of the laird's household. The lady was divided between pride
in her son's gifts, and grief to part with him. Master George solicited
his father's blessing that night, and afterwards spoke aside to Euphame
gracefully enough. "Mistress Euphame," he said, "I leave
my mother and the bairns to your care. I can rely upon it, for I have to
thank your integrity for a free course, and the being saved the toils
and perplexities forged by idleness and sealed by guile." He finished
with a blush that was not unbecoming in a diplomat, however the great
lord about court might have esteemed it. And it was very touching that
night to listen to the laird's supplication, out of the fulness of his
heart. How pathetically he petitioned that his lad, having been
delivered from the grossness which beset his predecessors, might use his
freedom nobly, and might not enter in another fool's paradise to have
his limbs bound with new ropes and fresh withs, until at last his hair
was shorn, and his strength had departed from him!
But in the end the laird resolved to go up with his
son to London, to satisfy himself regarding his prospects, and to
introduce him to his own political party. The lady and the children must
accompany them; and on account of this strange episode in their history,
Euphame parted from them with goodwill on each side, and vain promises
of future intercourse. Euphame soon learnt that she was to have Katie
Crichton's company to Edinburgh, for Katie was also out of place; not
from Master Ludovic's Heedlessness, but because upon one excuse and
another the Wintoun family were suddenly getting rid of many retainers
and hangers-on at Setoun, especially those who were in connexion with
the capital, and were only preserving and concentrating round them
trusty old adherents of the house. Katie bore the loss even more
patiently than Euphame; she feared the country would be dull in the
depth of winter; she was sure Master Ludovic would call upon her in the
High Street; Mark would not dare to control her, after she had been an
independent woman, out in the world on her own footing; and it was a
change, and the "good town" again to one who was altogether the denizen
of a town.
Agreeing to ride into Edinburgh in the same cavalcade
with Katie, Euphame was to proceed with her to the lodging-house in the
High Street, and it was settled by Lady Somerville that Euphame should
dwell with Mrs Crichton, maintaining herself by her handiwork until she
should find another situation. There was no incongruity in this
arrangement; it proceeded partly from necessity, but largely from that
old bond of neighbourly regard which has been commented upon. Lady
Somerville had long ago forgiven Mrs Crichton, and she did not see
herself warranted in depriving her of any natural advantage and
emolument. Euphame could neither be with my Lady Somerville nor with
Mistress Jonet; and so she was commended to her old companion's mother,
Mrs Crichton. Mrs Crichton was careless and improvident, but she was far
from dishonest and disreputable, as the times went; and probably her
failings would not have been improved, had she been deprived of her
resources, and curtailed of her custom. Euphame was a well-principled,
staid girl, and could take care of herself. The Vicar might not stand
alone in his theory, that the excellence which requires a constant
sentinel, and is rather hedged about than sent out to leaven, salt, and
cure the vice of the world, is not much worth the care wasted on its
preservation.
Thus Euphame once more rode by Pinkey House, but on a
winter's day, when the hoarfrost was glittering on bough and bush, as if
all the world was a—flower, with diamond roses. Euphame went quite
cheerfully to the stirring house in the High Street, although she was
distinct from its inmates. She found herself installed there without any
tribulation in her own mind, or in the minds of her friends on her
behalf. She sat at her frame, or she practised her womanly performances
with application and steadfastness, unharmed by the rout around her,
perhaps in some degree tending to compose it, like Jacob when he served
Laban, or Joseph finding favour in his Egyptian master's house. If she
had experienced any dangers too great for her strength, she might have
risen and fled ; but that would have been an extreme case with a
character like Eupharne's. This maiden of my Lady Somerville's inspired
respect wherever she went, and to excite that feeling even among
careless, irreverent, sceptical people, was to confer one invaluable
benefit.
So the first small, round hail drops of December
falling trustfully among the soot and smoke, and scarcely dried blood
stains of old Edinburgh—Euphame watched the shower from one of those
many square windows which look barefacedly, and sometimes at such
adjoining angles into each other, that facetious lodgers, hob-nobbed,
drank their claret, and took their snuff in company. It was a change
from rural Ormeslaw—its ivy and orchard, its turf dyke and birch trees,
and its farm-yard, and its country folks all looking out at this white
shower, if they were not to be supposed beflouered with the best, in the
fields— and predicting a severe or a mild winter from such simple
aphorisms as
"A hawey year's a snawey year;"
or, anticipating time in their saws, looking forward
with the promise,
"Gin Candlemas day be foul,
The half of winter's gane at Yule."
Euphame was a conspicuous figure in the family-room,
with its faded and dilapidated furniture, relics of Mrs Crichton's
better days, and its incredible accumulation of the nick-nacks, toys,
pets, and pests which fascinated the women of the eighteenth century.
The Crichtons had their ambition; they would not be behind their
neighbours in what indicated a genteel taste; they ran up a bill with a
china merchant, and they had even their books, though none of the
females of the family pretended to be scholars; still, it gave a mighty
fine air to the whole to have an approved volume or two among the
details. They, too, had their folio, with "great jars of china placed
one above another in a very noble piece of architecture," their quarto
separated from their octavo by a pile of smaller vessels, which rose in
a delightful pyramid, besides their tea dishes of all shapes, colours,
and sizes, so disposed on a wooden frame that they looked like one
continued pillar indented with the finest strokes of sculpture, and
stained with the greatest variety of dyes, and their grotesque square
filled up with "scaramoucheslions, monkeys, mandarines, trees, and
hills, and a thousand odd figures in china ware." Among the books might
possibly be found "Sherlock on Death," and "Ogilby's Virgil"—"Locke on
the Human Understanding, with a paper of patches in it" —"The Academy of
Compliments," and La Ferte's " Instructions for Country-dances,"
and certainly ''A Spelling Book," and "A Dictionary" for explanation of
hard words. Well might the visitor wonder whether he were "in a grotto
or in a library." [Spectator, No. 37.] But if he had been told he
was in a sitting-room, surely he would have commiserated the penance
done by the habitual occupants, and the incessant expense incurred to
supply unwitting breakages ; and if he had learned that Madam Crichton
and her daughters, in addition to their dead monsters, persisted in
cherishing living plagues in the shape of a draft from the lap-dogs, the
cats, the monkeys, the flying squirrels, the parrots, the Virginian
nightingales, the jack-daws, the owls, the bullfinches, canaries,
linnets, and white sparrows, with which the more sentimental spirits of
that generation would surround themselves, to the destruction of the
peace and comfort of their retainers,—his wonder would rise to utter
amazement at the maintenance of such a hostile jumble, and the weary
watching and slavery which it implied. The noise, the scrimmaging, the
racing, the chasing, the routing, the repairing, the guarding in the
lodging-house in the High Street! Well for Euphame that she had
excellent nerves, and unsurpassed powers of self-concentration—the only
living being who could sit there from morning till night—the sole
individual who presented there a settled purpose and an earnest
aim—unless, indeed, Mark, when he appeared for supper in the menagerie
and wareroom, which fine ladies and foolish waiting-women called a
parlour. [We have picked up the plight of a tradesman's wife,
indited by Lord Woodhouselee, in the later days of the Mirror:—''The
profits of our business, once considerable, but now daily diminishing,
are expended not only on coins, but on shells, lumps of different
coloured stones, dried butterflies, old pictures, ragged books, and
worm-eaten parchments. Our house, which it was once my highest pleasure
to keep in order, it would be now equally vain to attempt cleansing as
the ark of Noah. The children's bed is supplied by an Indian canoe; and
the poor little creatures sleep three of them in a hammock slung Up to
the roof between a stuffed crocodile and the skeleton of a calf with two
heads. Even the commodities of our shop have been turned out to make
room for trash and vermin. Kites, owls, and bats are perched upon the
top of our shelves; and it was but yesterday that, putting my hand into
a glass jar, that used to contain pickles, I laid hold of a large
tarantula in place of a mangoe."]
Indeed, they were an extravagant, unsettled,
disorderly family, these Crichtons. Their position might be a little in
fault—that debateable position which employs all the energies to
preserve its balance, which has not a broad enough basis for duties,
although it affords quite a wide enough space for rights. What could be
expected from Mrs Crichton, who kept a lodging-house, and her daughters,
who were poor waiting-women, but fighting for a living and striving
after rank? Again, how cruel to deny them their gentility, with their
dishes of tea, their little privileges and comforts at which they
grasped in the midst of their struggles! But, then, what becomes of the
widow's mite? Was the widow an easy-going woman, not to say a giddy one,
or was she very much in earnest?
Mrs Crichton was Katie grown old, with the ghost of
Katie's beauty—not a faded ghost, rather a purple one, for Mrs Crichton
painted pretty coarsely. Do not recoil, dear reader; many a more than
moderately respectable woman painted in the reigns of the first Georges.
The custom was so common, that there is a paper in the Spectator,
ranging those who painted and those who preserved their original
complexions into two races, and dubbing them the Picts and the British,
and arguing without a particle of acrimony, or any but the most literal
view of the subject, the the superiority of nature, and subjoining a
humorous advertisement:—
"A young gentlewoman, of about nineteen years of age,
(bred in the family of a person of quality lately deceased,) who paints
the finest flesh colour, wants a place, and is to be heard of at the
house of Mynheer Grotesque, a Dutch painter in Barbican.
"N.B.—She is also well skilled in the drapery part,
and puts on hoods, and mixes ribands, so as to suit the colours of the
face, with great art and success."
Corpulent, painted, with her gray hair powdered so as
to cover its whiteness, and her bishop satin gown side and wide, and
unconquerably careless, and from hand to mouth in her household economy
was Mrs Crichton. She had denied herself nothing, save in the upholding
of the porcelain mania. She denied other people nothing. She would have
made sack whey of her last pennyworth of milk, chucked away her final
farthing for early spinach or late asparagus, pledged her bigonet for a
ruffle, and exchanged her entire furniture for a week's jollity. A worse
guide for youth that looked to her for direction or owed her deference,
could not be imagined. Yet Mrs Crichton had her fair points. She was
very good-natured, she was always vaunting Euphame Napier's steadiness
and retirement from the world; although she yawned, and dawdled, and
stretched herself unceremoniously and in all directions, and built up
her china and fed her animals every hour of the day, and owned she could
not live without company. Nay, none of us could do that—only see that it
be the highest company, spiritual company, or else poor tenants in
tabernacles of clay, we must assuredly do without company one day. Mrs
Crichton had also an unqualified respect and affection for her son Mark,
though Mark was harsh, intolerant, deficient in outward respect and
consideration for the mother who wasted his slender means as a lad, and
if he did not forcibly prevent it, wasted his ampler means as a man. If
Mrs Crichton had been attached to so rough but upright a support as Mark
in her young days, would she have fared better? Hardly, in reality, or
to the depths of her shallow nature. There is no want of a stay for the
weak, such a stay as would serve all tempers, nor fail the most facile,
the most volatile.
Katie's sister Mysie was an older Katie,—not so bonny
or beguiling, not so wilful, but not so open. There had been another
sister, but she had vanished from the family roof, and her name was
silent within its walls. It was a miserably easy matter, in those
regardless, rapacious, corrupt times, to compass sin and ruin; but the
story sped in very much the same circles of shame, anguish, and
retribution. Mark was cognisant of Jean's fate; some portion of Mark's
earnings fell to the ground mysteriously, and in return Mark owed to an
"unfortunate" the additional sullenness which weighed upon him, the
consummation which made of the grave morose boy, a gloomy, passionate
man.
It was an evil crown to Mark Crichton's strong, dark
manhood, that bitter droop of the lips and contraction of the brows,
that helpless protest against the cup whose dregs he shook and stirred
up, and excited into more noxious fumes. Ah! Mark knew nothing
experimentally of dropping into the draught wood more potent than that
of Moses, salt more efficacious than that of Elisha, the symbol of the
cross the figure of another's effectual and victorious sufferings.
Euphame Napier was sorry for Mark Crichton now. She
was not so pitiless as in the clear, hard days of her girlhood, when she
differed from the old mother in the Trinity. She was not frightened at
Mark as the others were; he did not repel her as he repelled the
pleasure-loving Katie. Possibly Euphame rather admired, though she did
not approve of Mark's gruff-ness as of his brawny arm, his resounding
foot, his high head with its coal-black, tangled hair. The male
character, in those women's imaginations, ran very much into two
channels, that of the "sweet youth" and the "lovely swain," and that of
the blunt Mr Burchell and Sir William Worthy; and if Olivia was so sadly
taken with dissipated, vain, impudent, silly young Squire Thornhill,
remember Sophia inclined from the first, and more disinterestedly, to
plain Mr Burchell with his rude " fudge." Mark did not display, in word
or manner, anything of the philanthropy of that benevolent man; but
still it was the same temperament, and the same attraction, and the same
powerful, auxiliary of pity—for Mark was evidently a man at war with the
world, and even with his remarkable strength and endurance, worsted and
bruised, though not yet beaten in the contest. And poor Mark's motto,
for ever on his lips, was the sentence inscribed in the neighbourhood of
the house of his master, Paul Romieu, the foreign clockmaker in the Bow,
where the first watch made in Scotland was put together:
"He that tholes overcomes."
Think of that! Great for a stoic, small for a
Christian, if, as in the case of Mark Crichton, when Euphame asked him
what he would overcome, and for whom, he answered, with a short laugh,
he knew not, unless crowns like Adie Napier's guilders; and when he had
earned them, he could not tell what he would do with them. He would not
found an hospital; perhaps he would gather metal and cast another statue
of another debauched King Charles for another Parliament Square. Yet
this stubborn, mistaken, unhappy man, as Euphame had penetration to
discover, kept his old George Heriot's tokens jealously; stole at an
idle moment into the grounds of the hospital, and lay moodily meditating
under its trees; followed his master, Paul Romieu, armed with a cudgel,
to defend him from the prejudices of the vulgar, every time he went
abroad of nights; though Master Paul, the meekest of little,
bright-eyed, vehement, entranced, loyal men, repudiated the attention as
an old form of servitude, vexatious and humiliating, and not to be
exacted from an apprentice of parts and breeding as stout as he was
able. And to this savage Mark, and his squandered allowance, Mrs
Crichton had recourse every few weeks, wringing her hands the one moment
and clapping them the next.
There was a gulf between baulked Mark Crichton and
Euphame, in the dignity of her settled purpose, in the serenity of her
faith, in her uncorrupted fidelity and generous philanthropy, on
friendly terms with the social crowd of her little world, because it was
in the way of permitting her to serve its members. Still. Euphame and
Mark bore decidedly greater resemblance to each other than to the rest
of that household; they were in earnest, they were sober and
industrious—only Mark's was a noble nature, filled with the ashes of
this world, and Euphame had heavenly food, adulterated it might be, but
still with its blessed heavenly element. The others were all but
incorrigible.
II.
Would you wish to see into the old lodging-house in
the High Street, that you might learn how cracked and patched, and
flaunting and meretricious mere idleness and folly may render
themselves?
Euphame would be up and at her devotions, and in the
half faded, half garish, wholly cumbered room, hours before the rest of
the family were out of bed, unless Mark, whose heavy step disturbed the
aristocratic lodgers, descending in the dark to his morning's work at
the Romieus. Euphame would try to dust and dispose of tables, chairs,
cabinets, and brittle ornaments, but long before night they would be
besmutted, pulled about, littered, shattered worse than ever; the
popinjay, whose neck Mark was always to twist, would scream and dab at
her with his crooked beak, one or other of the little dogs would gnaw
her slippers, the caddies in the street below would shout for orders,
the water-carriers cry their refreshing streams; and at last such a
night-capped, sluttish, soiled, drowsy face would look in at the door,
as you have never seen, gentle reader, for Scotch women of 1860 do not
indulge in the sloth, the untidiness, the impurities which passed "under
the general name of a mob" a hundred and fifty years ago. They are not
so seen by relatives, they are not so surprised by strangers, they do
not need to apologise, "Truly, I am ashamed to be caught in this pickle;
but my husband and I were sitting alone by ourselves, and I did not
expect to see such good company." Russian ladies, they say, still appear
in such toilettes, and Russian ladies alone. Sleeves tucked up to the
elbow, neckerchief dragged away, gown drawn ever so far through the
pocket holes for convenience, feet slip shod.
"Oh Euphanie Napier, how cauld it is! Child, how
could you touch cold water? I'm afeared I'll be frosted, fingers and
toes, before I can begin my meal. Throw a napkin over the Polly's cage,
I cannot hear myself speak. O Euphame, who has cracked Corrydon's crook?
Pug, pug, lie still till I get you a bite to stop your mouth. My mother
and that spoilt gypsy, Katie, are well off; they breakfast a-bed,—and so
down to the table covered with manchets, eggs, haddocks, steaks, burnt
claret, ale, milk, as if it were my Lord Abruchil's appetite that was to
be coaxed, and not the tastes of the Crichtons in their lodging-house."
The Crichtons professed and did make an attempt to
obtain their bread much in the same way as Euphame, with the addition of
the income derived from their lodgers. They executed worsted work for
the upholsterers, bugle and bead work and braiding for the manteau-makers;
they even employed those precious shapes in pastry and sweetmeats for
the confectioners, and they waited on their lodgers. These lodgers
naturally filled a conspicuous place in their life, and stood in a
peculiar relation to them. Whether they were beautiful and witty Mrs
Susannah, wedded long since to the elderly, widowed Earl of Eglintoun,
(when did poets fare otherwise than by loss in their wooing?) or my Lady
Cauldacres with her pining spinster daughters, or young Summerton in his
honeymoon with the wife—whom he was already neglecting. Those lodgers
mostly condescended to easy intimacy with the Crichtons— whether or not
they corresponded with them afterwards under fancy names, and with
passages in their letters writ in lemon juice—and found them very
available, admiring, humble friends, who aped them enthusiastically, and
would have toiled till they fainted for them—or their estate.
Thus we understand why the intrepid Countess of
Nithsdale, in her perilous adventure at the last hour for her lord's
safety, confided neither the secret nor its abetment to her friend the
Duchess of Montrose, nor to any member of her noble kinswomen, but
trusted implicitly to the adroitness and devotion of Mrs Mill, the
keeper of her lodging-house, and of one Mrs Morgan, in the same degree;
and it is "dear Mrs Catherine," whose name is used to smuggle out the
first performer, and "dear Mrs Betty," who is honoured with incurring
the penalty of high treason in the person of the second player, and the
principal in the act— my lord himself, assuming for the nonce her part,
sandy hair, painted cheeks, hood, and all, and effecting his escape
under the well-managed disguise. So even the Queen of the Amazons loving
Grizel Cochrane relied on her old English nurse, and not on brother or
sister, in her bold device to reprieve her father.
(To he continued.)