"What woman?" replied the clerk.
"The woman with the white mice."
"Oh," cried the young man, "we have no faith in that quarter—a mere get-up; but we're looking about for her, notwithstanding."
"Well, tell your master that Meg Davidson was last seen on the Muir of Rannoch, and that the Highlanders in that outlandish quarter, having never seen white mice before, are in a state of perfect amazement."
A bolt at some other person left the clerk probably in as great amazement as the Highlanders; but our man of the law did not stop to see the extent of it. All his avocations, however, did not prevent the coming round of that seven o'clock on Wednesday evening, which he had appointed as the hour of meeting with the woman on whom his hopes of saving his client almost altogether rested. He was at his desk at the hour, and the woman, no doubt eager for the phenomenon of the "louping ee," was as true as the time itself. The writer locked the door of his office, and drawing her as near him as possible, inquired first whether any knew she was in town.
"Deil are," she replied; "naebody cares for me ony mair than I were an auld glandered spavin, ready for the knackers."
"And you've been remembering a' ye are to say?"
Now, the woman did not answer this question immediately. She had been, for some days, busy in the repository of her memory—a crazy box of shattered spunk-wood, through the crevices of which came the lurid lights sent from another box, called the imagination, and such was the close intimacy, or rather mixture, of the revelations of these two magic centres, that they could not be distinguished from one another; but the habit of fortune-telling had so quickened the light of the one, as to make it predominate over, and almost extinguish that of the other, so that she was at a loss to get a stray glimmer of the memory, to make her ready, on the instant, for the answer.
"Remembering! Ay," she said, "there's no muckle to remember. The lass was under the burden of shame, and couldna bear it: she wanted some doctor's trash to tak that burden aff her, if it should carry her life alang wi' 't. I got the stuff, and the woman dee'd."
All which was carefully written down—but the writer had his own way of doing his work. He would have day and date, the place where the doctor's trash was bought, the price thereof, the manner of administering the same, and many other particulars, every one of which was so carefully recorded, that the whole, no doubt, looked like a veritable precognition of facts, got from the said box called the memory, as if it had been that not one tint of light, from the conterminous chamber, had mixed with the pure spirit of truth.