“What do I want!” replied she, in a sulky tone—“I want my bairn, or I want naething frae nane o’ ye, for as grand’s ye are.” And she went on muttering to herself with the wayward spitefulness of age—“They maun hae lordships and honours, nae doubt—set them up, the gutter-bloods! and deil a gentleman amang them.”—Then again addressing the sitting magistrate, “Will your honour gie me back my puir crazy bairn?—His honour!—I hae kend the day when less wad ser’d him, the oe of a Campvere skipper.”
“Good woman,” said the magistrate to this shrewish supplicant—“tell us what it is you want, and do not interrupt the court.”
“That’s as muckle as till say, Bark, Bawtie, and be dune wi’t!—I tell ye,” raising her termagant voice, “I want my bairn! is na that braid Scots?”
“Who are you?—who is your bairn?” demanded the magistrate.
“Wha am I?—wha suld I be, but Meg Murdockson, and wha suld my bairn be but Magdalen Murdockson?—Your guard soldiers, and your constables, and your officers, ken us weel eneugh when they rive the bits o’ duds aff our backs, and take what penny o’ siller we hae, and harle us to the Correctionhouse in Leith Wynd, and pettle us up wi’ bread and water and siclike sunkets.”
“Who is she?” said the magistrate, looking round to some of his people.
“Other than a gude ane, sir,” said one of the city officers, shrugging his shoulders and smiling.
“Will ye say sae?” said the termagant, her eye gleaming with impotent fury; “an I had ye amang the Figgat-Whins,* wadna I set my ten talents in your wuzzent face for that very word?” and she suited the word to the action, by spreading out a set of claws resembling those of St. George’s dragon on a country sign-post.
* [This was a name given to a tract of sand hillocks extending along the sea-shore from Leith to Portobello, and which at this time were covered with whin-bushes or furze.]
“What does she want here?” said the impatient magistrate—“Can she not tell her business, or go away?”