“And when you go to—I mean to the place you deserve to go to, you scoundrel,—who do you think will uphold you on contract? If you don’t stop directly and carry the poor brute, to the next smithy, I’ll have you punished, if there’s a justice of peace in Mid-Lothian;” and, opening the coach-door, out he jumped, while the coachman obeyed his orders, muttering, that “if the gentlemen lost the tide now, they could not say but it was their ain fault, since he was willing to get on.”
I like so little to analyze the complication of the causes which influence actions, that I will not venture to ascertain whether our Antiquary’s humanity to the poor horse was not in some degree aided by his desire of showing his companion a Pict’s camp, or Round-about, a subject which he had been elaborately discussing, and of which a specimen, “very curious and perfect indeed,” happened to exist about a hundred yards distant from the spot where this interruption took place. But were I compelled to decompose the motives of my worthy friend (for such was the gentleman in the sober suit, with powdered wig and slouched hat), I should say, that, although he certainly would not in any case have suffered the coachman to proceed while the horse was unfit for service, and likely to suffer by being urged forward, yet the man of whipcord escaped some severe abuse and reproach by the agreeable mode which the traveller found out to pass the interval of delay.
So much time was consumed by these interruptions of their journey, that when they descended the hill above the Hawes (for so the inn on the southern side of the Queensferry is denominated), the experienced eye of the Antiquary at once discerned, from the extent of wet sand, and the number of black stones and rocks, covered with sea-weed, which were visible along the skirts of the shore, that the hour of tide was past. The young traveller expected a burst of indignation; but whether, as Croaker says in “The Good-natured Man,” our hero had exhausted himself in fretting away his misfortunes beforehand, so that he did not feel them when they actually arrived, or whether he found the company in which he was placed too congenial to lead him to repine at anything which delayed his journey, it is certain that he submitted to his lot with much resignation.
“The d—l’s in the diligence and the old hag, it belongs to!—Diligence, quoth I? Thou shouldst have called it the Sloth—Fly, quoth she? why, it moves like a fly through a glue-pot, as the Irishman says. But, however, time and tide tarry for no man, and so, my young friend, we’ll have a snack here at the Hawes, which is a very decent sort of a place, and I’ll be very happy to finish the account I was giving you of the difference between the mode of entrenching castra stativa and castra aestiva, things confounded by too many of our historians. Lack-a-day, if they had ta’en the pains to satisfy their own eyes, instead of following each other’s blind guidance!—Well! we shall be pretty comfortable at the Hawes; and besides, after all, we must have dined somewhere, and it will be pleasanter sailing with the tide of ebb and the evening breeze.”
In this Christian temper of making the best of all occurrences, our travellers alighted at the Hawes.
CHAPTER SECOND.
Sir, they do scandal me upon the road here!
A poor quotidian rack of mutton roasted
Dry to be grated! and that driven down
With beer and butter-milk, mingled together.
It is against my freehold, my inheritance.
Wine is the word that glads the heart of man,
And mine’s the house of wine. Sack, says my bush,
Be merry and drink Sherry, that’s my posie.
Ben Jonson’s New Inn.
As the senior traveller descended the crazy steps of the diligence at the inn, he was greeted by the fat, gouty, pursy landlord, with that mixture of familiarity and respect which the Scotch innkeepers of the old school used to assume towards their more valued customers.
“Have a care o’ us, Monkbarns (distinguishing him by his territorial epithet, always most agreeable to the ear of a Scottish proprietor), is this you? I little thought to have seen your honour here till the summer session was ower.”