"You may weel say't," said the other; "But let me see if you can draw that lang sword as weel an' as cleverly as I can do."
"Gude Lord, hear til him!" said the first: "He's speaking as he were the true Charlie Scott himsel! Speak ye, friend: Were you me before this! That, is, did you ride with the warden over the border?"
"I am sure if you were there, I never saw you before," said the second speaker; "But I dinna ken what I am saying; for the truth is I dinna comprehend this."
With that they again gazed at each other, and looked over their shoulders, as if they would not have cared to have fled from one another's presence.
With every pair the scene was much the same. Tam was so much astonished that he turned to his second self, cowered down, leaning his hands upon his knees, and made a staunch point at him. The other took precisely the same posture, so that their long noses almost met. The maid, the poet, and the boy screamed with laughter. Both of the Tams laughed too, so that they very much resembled an ideot looking at himself in a glass.
"Friend, I canna say but ye're very like me," said Gibbie to his partner; "But, though nane o' us be great beauties, ye look rather the warst o' the twae."
"It brings me a-mind o' a story I hae heard my mother tell," said the other, "of a lady and her twa Blackamores"—
"What the deil man!" exclaimed the first; "Did your mother tell that story too?"
"Ay; wha else but she tauld it? I say my mother, auld Effy Blakely of the Peatstacknowe."
"Eh?—She your mother? It is gayan queer if we be baith ane after a'! for I never had a billy."