"How, sirrah? where were her chairmen?"
"Where they are even now—in the water-hole of the town-guard—a dungeon vaulted wi' stane, dark as pitch, and half fu' o' water. Gif your lordship does na ken sic a place, owre weel do I, for there I passed fifteen weary days and eerie nights, after Bothwellbrig, shivering like a rat in an ice-house."
"Gomeral! is this a place for thy pestilent reminiscences of Bothwell? Ye obeyed my orders?"
"To the letter o' the law, as my lord Mersington says. I have made Lady Grisel's servitors as fu' as strong October, reeking usquebaugh, ay, and a three gallon runlet of gude red Rhenish, at sixpence the quart, could make them. But then, by way o' repaying my hospitality, they began misnaming your Lordship."
"What said the knaves?"
"That ye were but a cock-laird o' Cramond, for a' your baron's coronet, and a fause whig and misleared covenanter at heart."
"Foh! it matters not," replied Clermistonlee. "I will have all those varlets under my thumb ere long, and then I will teach them the respect that is due to my coronet. A cock-laird! By all the devils, they shall have their tongues bodkinned, and their ears nailed to the Tron, as a terror to all such plebeian rascals. But what didst thou, and this great baboon thy nephew, when these rascals made so free with our family?"
"We sweeped the house wi' the hair o' their heads—eh, Jock?"
"Ay," gaped the personage appealed to.
"My birse rose at the first word, and drawing my whinger, I fell on like a Stenton. Jock threw owre the buird and settles, and laid about him wi' a three-leggit stule. The gudewife o' the change-house scraighed like a howlet, and a' gaed to wreck. Shelves o' dishes and tin flagons, caups and luggies, Leith crystal and Delft ware, iron pots and pewter trenchers, a' flew like a hailstorm, and we laid about us like naething that I mind o', but the tulzie at Bothwell, when Dalyel's troopers broke the brig-ward, and fell on us sword in hand."