"How! will no other than the queen's physician and perfumer serve thee? Thou shalt have the essences, too, and"——
"A hundred angels of silver, too—eh?"
"A hundred yelling devils!" replied the Earl.
"I will not require thy page with so many attendants."
"Thou art a cunning gipsy," said Morton, grinning under his long beard, and taking a purse from his girdle, where (as pockets were not then invented) it hung beside his dagger. "Here are eighty for thee; and not one devilish tester more can I give, even were it to purchase my own salvation—so, now let us kiss and be friends."
Alison was now in excellent humour; she sang a few snatches of "Gilquhiskar," and "Troly loly Lemendow," two merry old ditties, while she played with Morton's preposterous beard, and acted the coquette, and he affected the gallant—each in secret despising the other. But after a time, relinquishing the frizzling of her locks and adjustment of her Elizabethan pearl bobs, Alison turned her attention to the crowd of jostling passengers, that now, as the morning had advanced, and the Porte of St. Mary was open, streamed through the wynd.
Meanwhile that Anna, timid, confused, and broken-spirited, in her character of page, had retired a little into the background, Alison Craig was amusing the Earl by quizzing the appearance and gait of every person who passed—handling them with all due severity.
"Marry, come up! look, Lord Earl! yonder goeth Master George Buchanan, in his conical beaver and threadbare cloak, with a great book under his arm. Tantony! but he looketh very rusty to be Director of the Chancery—but, lo!" she exclaimed, as a burly country gentleman, in a whalebone ruff, and barrelled doublet of green broad cloth, with a great broadsword belted about him, and his lady riding lovingly on a pillion behind him, ambled up the street; "'Tis the old laird of Braid, and Dame Marjory Fairly, his gudewife."
"They are just married, sweetheart—else why ride they so lovingly?"
"Nay! they have been wedded these thirty years, and had two tall sons shot at the siege of Leith, by Monsieur Brissac," replied the lady, with an explosion of laughter. "But the laird is a gomeral, and his dame in her great tub-fardingale—O Jesu! see yonder gay galliard, with a feather in his hat and a falcon on his thumb!"