THE SURTOUT.
"The decreet's oot the morn, Mr Fairly, against that man Simmins," quoth an equivocal-looking gentleman, with a stick under his arm, a marvellously shabby hat, a rusty black coat, waistcoat pinned up to the throat, and followed out by a battered stock, glazed and greasy, with its edges worn to the bone; and thus making an unseemly exhibition of the internal composition of said article of wearing apparel. No shirt, or at least none visible; countenance bearing strong marks of dissipation; voice loud and ferocious; look equivocal. Such was the personage who conveyed the information above recorded to Mr Fairly; and, considering the very particular nature of that information, together with certain other little circumstances thereafter following, the reader will be at no great loss, we should suppose, to guess both the nature of his profession and the purpose of his call. In case, however, he should not, we beg to inform him that the speaker was one of those meritorious enforcers of the law, called, in Scotland, messengers—in England, bailiffs.
Mr Fairly, again—the person spoken to—was a fashionable tailor in a certain city not a hundred miles from Arthur's Seat. He was a little, active man, sharp and keen as a razor; and altogether a dangerous-looking customer to those who found it inconvenient to settle his demands in due time; he was, in short, the dread and terror of dilatory payers. In such cases, he hung out the black flag, and gave no quarter. He was, in truth, just as merciless a tailor as ever cut cloth, and well were his savage propensities known to, and much were they respected by, a certain class of his customers—meaning those who stuck too long on the left-hand side of his ledger—the fatal ledger. Such, then, was our other interlocutor, Mr Fairly. We have only to add, that the scene which we have opened was in a certain parlour in that gentleman's house, and then to proceed with the conference which this necessary digression has interrupted.
"The decreet's oot the morn, Mr Fairly, against that man Simmins," said his visiter, Mr John Howison; "what do ye mean to do? Are we to incarcerate?"
It was a needless question; for Fairly incarcerated everybody, right and left, in such circumstances, sparing neither sex nor age.
"Incarcerate!" he repeated, with a ferocious emphasis. "Surely, surely. Nab the scoundrel. Don't give him a minute beyond his time. Let me see what were the articles again." And he proceeded to turn over the leaves of his ominous ledger. "Ay, a surtout, extra superfine Saxony blue, richly braided, &c. &c., £4:15s., due 21st December, and this is the 19th January. A month past date! Nab him, Howison. Nab the villain, and we'll give him six months of the cage, at any rate, and that'll be some satisfaction."
Howison grinned a grin, partly of satisfaction at the prospect of a job, and partly of approval of his employer's wit. "But I don't know the chap exactly," said the former. "I only saw him once."
"Oh, that's easily sorted," replied Fairly. "Although you don't know him, you may know my surtout, which he constantly wears—having no other coat, I verily believe, to his back. Here, see, here is the neighbour of it." And he ran into a back apartment, whence he shortly returned with a very flashy article of the description he referred to, and, expanding it before Howison, bade him mark its peculiarities. "Sir," he said, "it's one of a thousand. The only one of the same cut and fashion in the whole city. That I know. I would pick it out, blind, from amongst a million."