"By the corslet which he wears under his coat, and the jaunty cock of his beaver, I would say he had been a soldier."
"Good again—give him my most humble commendations, and ask him to share thy boasted posset of wine with me."
"What name did you say, sir?"
"Thou inquisitive varlet, I said no name," replied the gentleman, with a smile. "In these times men do not lightly give their names to each other, when the land is swarming with Jacobite plotters and government spies, disguised Jesuits, and Presbyterian tyrants. I may be the Devil or the Pope, for all thou knowest."
"Might ye no be the Pretender?" said Spiggot, with a sour smile.
"Nay, I have a better travelling name than that; but say to this gentleman that the Major of Marshal Orkney's Dragoons requests the pleasure of sharing a stoup of wine with him."
"Sir, it mattereth little whether you give your name or no," replied the host bitterly; "for we are a' nameless now. Twelve months ago, we were true Scottish men, but now——"
"Our king is an exile—our crown is buried for ever, and our brave soldiers are banished to far and foreign wars, while the grass is growing green in the streets of our capital—ay, green as it is at this hour in your burgh of Crail; but, hence to the stranger; yet say not," added the traveller, bitterly and proudly, "that in his warmth the Scottish cavalier has betrayed himself."
While the speaker amused himself with examining a printed proclamation concerning the "Tiend Commissioners and Transplantation off Paroch Kirkis," which was pasted over the stone mantlepiece of the bar, the landlord returned with the foreign gentleman's thanks, and an invitation to his chamber, whither the Major immediately repaired; following the host up a narrow stone spiral stair to a snugly-wainscotted room, against the well-grated windows of which a sudden shower was now beginning to patter.
The foreigner, who was supping on a Crail-capon (in other words a broiled haddock) and stoup of Bourdeaux wine, arose at their entrance, and bowed with an air that was undisguisedly continental. He was a man above six feet, with a long straight nose, over which his dark eyebrows met and formed one unbroken line. He wore a suit of green Genoese velvet, so richly laced that little of the cloth was visible; a full-bottomed wig, and a small corslet of the brightest steel (over which hung the ends of his cravat), as well as a pair of silver-mounted cavalry pistols that lay on the table, together with his unmistakable bearing, decided the Major of Orkney's that the stranger was a brother of the sword.