“Quite a mistake, Johnny,” replied the noble retainer, with a supercilious glance at our friend, who was still perched high in air.
“Oh! if ye come to go to be a-leaving off of names, old Timothy, you’ll find I’ve a way of writing my card with my five fingers here in a text hand as no gentleman can mistake.”
While boasting of his literary acquirements, our Hector in livery slewed himself down from the side of the red-cheeked Andromache, and presented an appearance which apparently induced the gentleman in the cockade to believe that the mistake might possibly be on his own side.
“My lord is in a great hurry.”
“So is my ladies.”
“He must have four horses.”
“They must have two.”
“Lauds!” exclaimed the voice of the hostess, addressing three or four stable-men who had been gaping spectators of this altercation, “bring yer grapes and pitchin’ forks here, an’ lift this birkie wi’ the cockaud in his head back till his seat again. Tell Jock Brown to get his boots on wi’ a’ his micht, and drive thir ladies to Douglas’s Hotel. An’ I’m sayin’, if ony o’ thae English bit craturs, wi’ their clippy tongues, lays hand on bit or bridle o’ ony o’ my horses, dinna spare the pitchin’ fork—pit it through them as ye wad a lock strae; I’ll hae nae rubbery in my stable-yaird—I’m braw freens wi’ the Justice-Clerk.”
As affairs now appeared to grow serious, the Noah’s Ark disembogued the whole of its living contents, and a minute inspection of the stables was commenced by the whole party. The ladies, in the mean time, who had some confused idea that all was not right, were looking anxiously from the windows; and if the elder lady had been an attentive observer of her companion’s looks, she would have seen a flush of surprise suffuse her whole countenance as her eyes for an instant rested on one of the gentlemen, who stood apparently an uninterested spectator of the proceedings of his friends. A similar feeling of amazement seemed to take possession of the champion of the ladies, as he recognised the same individual. He left his antagonist in the very middle of a philippic that ought to have sunk that gentleman in his own estimation for ever, and walking hurriedly up to the gentleman, who was still in what is called a reverie, said—
“Mr Harry!—hope ye’re quite well, sir?”