CHAPTER II.
IN GLASGOW TOWN.
It was as late as half-past ten o'clock—and on a sufficiently gray and dull and cheerless morning—that Ronald's landlady, surprised not to have heard him stirring, knocked at his room. There was no answer. Then she knocked again, opened the door an inch or two, and dropped a letter on the floor.
'Are ye no up yet?'
The sound of her voice aroused him.
'In a minute, woman,' he said sleepily; and, being thus satisfied, the landlady went off, shutting the door behind her.
He rose in the bed and looked around him, in a dazed fashion. He was already partially dressed, for he had been up two hours before, but had thrown himself down on the bed again, over-fatigued, half-stupefied, and altogether discontented. The fact is, he had come home the night before in a reckless mood, and had sate on through hour after hour until it was nearly dawn, harassing himself with idle dreams and idle regrets, drinking to drown care, smoking incessantly, sometimes scrawling half-scornful rhymes. There were all the evidences now on the table before him—a whisky-bottle, a tumbler, a wooden pipe and plenty of ashes, a sheet of paper scrawled over in an uncertain hand. He took up that sheet to recall what he had written:
King Death came striding along the road,
And he laughed aloud to see
How every rich man's mother's son