Gentlemen in glittering doublets and laced mantles, with hawks on their wrists, and well-armed serving-men in attendance, rode into the city, singly or together, from hawking the gled and the heron by Corstorphine loch and Wardie muir, or from visiting the towers and mansions in the neighbourhood. Few remained without the fortifications after nightfall, for our ancestors were all a-bed betimes.
In half an hour more, the foliage darkened in the cold and steady twilight of June; but a crimson flush yet lingered in the west to show where the sun had set.
The two wearied wayfarers approached the lower barrier of Edinburgh, which faced the steep street known as Leith Wynd, the whole eastern side of which was in ruins, having been burned by the English invaders, under the Earl of Hertford, sixteen years before.
In the fair young man, armed with a round headpiece and corselet, the reader will recognise Konrad the Norwegian, and in the boy that accompanied him, may perceive the soft features and long tresses of Anna, notwithstanding the plain grey gaberdine, the sarcenet hosen, and blue cloth bonnet, under which she had veiled her beauty and concealed her sex. She had all the appearance of a slender and sickly boy, with hollow eyes and parched lips, exhausted by fatigue and privation.
Tremblingly she clung to Konrad as they drew near the low but massive arch of the Leith Wynd Porte, where he knocked on the nail-studded wicket with the pommel of his Norwayn dagger. A small vizzying-hole was unclosed, and the keen grey eye of one of the burghers on guard was seen to survey them strictly under the peak of his morion; for, by an act of the city council, every fourth citizen capable of bearing armour, had to keep watch and ward by night, completely armed with sword and jedwood axe, arquebuss and dagger, for the prevention of surprise from without, and suppression of disturbance within the burgh.
"Now, wha may ye be, and what want ye?" asked the burgher gruffly and suspiciously.
"Who I may be matters little to such as thou," replied Konrad, haughtily; "what I seek is entrance and civility, for I like not thy bearing, sirrah."
"Then I let ye to wit, that without kenning the first, thou canst not hae the second," replied the citizen, whose Protestant prejudices began to rise against one, whom he shrewdly deemed by his foreign accent to be a Frenchman, and consequently, a "trafficking messe preist," as the term was. "I fear me we hae enow o' your kind doon the gate at Holyrood. Some mass-monger, I warrant! Hast thou ever heard Master Knox preach?"
"No—who is he?"
"Wha is he!" reiterated the citizen, opening the pannel, his eyes and his mouth wider in his breathless astonishment. "What country is yours, or wharawa is't, that ye havena heard o' him, who is wise as Soloman, upright as David, patient as Job, as stark as the deevil himsel?"