How I passed the night, I do not remember, whether sleeping or waking; but when St. Giles's bell rang the hour of nine, with other prisoners, who had been arrested on suspicion of having been engaged in the riot of the past day, or in the assault on the Provost's house, I was conducted by the guard, with their bayonets fixed, to the presence—not of the magistrates, but of the City Chamberlain—who, in those strange times, possessed a power and a perquisite that will scarcely be recognized or understood now.
He received a fee—some ten or fifteen shillings—for each boy whom he sent into his Majesty's sea-service, and thus every unfortunate urchin whom the guard could glean up after dark, whether innocent or guilty of crime mattered not, stood a very good chance of being sent off to see "the mysteries of the great deep," with a cat-o'-nine-tails at his back by way of an appetiser. In this way, during the early part of the last war, the chamberlain of his Majesty's ancient capital of Scotland realized a pretty round sum yearly. In Aberdeen, this system of kidnapping was carried to a still more atrocious extent by the magistrates, who sold the boys of the city as slaves to the Dutch and Spaniards.
What mattered it, though many a mother's heart was wrung—perhaps broken—by the sudden and unaccountable disappearance of a dearly-loved son; or that a fond father found the hope of his future years—his years of old age and helplessness—taken from him, if ten shillings or so were put into the pocket of the douce, pious, and church-going city chamberlain? Yet such enormities were practised in the capital of a country where once no man brooked a wrong, without appealing to the sword and dagger.
We were conducted into a large panelled room, of antique aspect, opening off one of the great stone staircases of the Royal Exchange. There I was enclosed in a species of bar, with three or four other boys, Corporal Dhu and another grim city guardsman, with his fixed bayonet and long musket, keeping watch over us; and then, to my dismay, I found myself before Mr. Macrocodile, and one or two other men of similarly ascetic aspect,—
"Most potent, grave, and reverend seigniors,—
My very noble and approved good masters.
He was the bosom friend of Macfarisee; for years they had mixed their prayers and their whiskey-punch together, and wept in public over the sinfulness of this stiffnecked generation. He was one of the chief canters in the Reverend Mr. Pawkie's synagogue; and I knew that he remembered bitterly the affair of his wig, for his red ferret-eyes glared like two living coals when he saw me; and, during the discussion of one or two petty cases, in which boys were accused of breaking street-lamps, or pelting the city guard—cases which he heard and dismissed with, an air of vast magisterial importance, mixed with no small amount of the cant and slang used in the inferior departments of office, when power is wielded by a parvenu.
Just before my "case" was to be heard, as the devil would have it, Macfarisee entered the court, and gave me (though endeavouring to conceal it under his last-will-and-testament expression) a glance full of triumph and malice, to which I replied by one of hatred and defiance. The ruling elder seemed very pale; one of his eyes bore a few rainbow hues; he had a long piece of black plaster on the bridge of his nose, and another on his head, and none of these accessions tended in any way to improve his general appearance.
"Oliver Ellis!" exclaimed a clerk, referring to a paper.
I looked up. Macrocodile and Macfarisee—the Minos and Rhadamanthus, who were to loose or bind, to condemn or pardon—were ominously whispering together; and I felt that in such hands my chance of the latter was remarkably slender indeed; but pride inspired me to put a bold front on the affair.
"Of what am I accused?" I demanded.