He hastened to say his name was Brown, a captain in the----regiment of cavalry, travelling for pleasure, and on foot, both from motives of independence and economy; and he begged his kind landlady would look at her husband's wounds, the state of which he had refused to permit him to examine.

Mrs.Dinmont was used to her husband's broken heads more than to the presence of a captain of dragoons.

She therefore glanced at a table-cloth not quite clean, and conned over her proposed supper a minute or two, before, patting her husband on the shoulder, she bade him sit down for 'a hard-headed loon, that was aye bringing himsell and other folk into collie-shangies.' When Dandie Dinmont, after executing two or three caprioles, and cutting the Highland fling, by way of ridicule of his wife's anxiety, at last deigned to sit down and commit his round, black, shaggy bullet of a head to her inspection, Brown thought he had seen the regimental surgeon look grave upon a more trifling case.

The gudewife, however, showed some knowledge of chirurgery; she cut away with her scissors the gory locks whose stiffened and coagulated clusters interfered with her operations, and clapped on the wound some lint besmeared with a vulnerary salve, esteemed sovereign by the whole dale (which afforded upon fair nights considerable experience of such cases); she then fixed her plaster with a bandage, and, spite of her patient's resistance, pulled over all a night-cap, to keep everything in its right place.

Some contusions on the brow and shoulders she fomented with brandy, which the patient did not permit till the medicine had paid a heavy toll to his mouth.