"Hath he taken the test," asked Maclutchy, "and did he acknowledge the king's authority?"
"Ou onything, and so would you, Maclutchy, gif I had ye under my hand as I'll soon hae that young birkie in the corner."
"'Tis false!" cried Ichabod Bummel, through his clenched teeth, "and sooner than acknowledge that bloody and papistical duke, I would kiss, yea, and believe the book of the accursed Mohamet, whilk as I shew in my 'Bombshell aimit at the taile of the great Beast,' was written on auld spule banes, and kept by the gude wife of the impostor in a meal girnel. But fie! and out upon ye, fiends, for lo, the hour of our triumph and deliverance from tyrants and massemongers is at hand. O, why tarry the chariot wheels of our Deliverer?"
"I like ane owl in desart am,
That nightly——"
"What!" exclaimed Maclutchy, in legal horror, "would ye dare to skirl a psalm within earshot o' the very Lords o' Council, ye desperate cheat, the woodie! Awa wi' him by the lug and horn, or he'll bring the roof about us." He was hurried off.
Walter was deeply moved. Pity and indignation stirred his heart by turns, but he had not much time for reflection; at that moment the drawling voice of the crier was heard, calling with a cadence peculiar to the Scottish courts,
"Maister-Walter-Fenton."
He became more alive to his own immediate danger, and ere he well knew what passed, found himself in another gloomy and pannelled apartment, one-half of which was hung with scarlet cloth. On a dais stood the vacant throne with the royal arms of Scotland glittering under a canopy of velvet, festooned and fringed with gold.
Scott has given us a graphic picture of this strange tribunal, when it was presided over by the odious Duke of Lauderdale. Let us take a view of it as it appeared six years after, when that scourge of the Presbyterians had departed to render at a greater bar an account of his tyranny and enormities.