CHAPTER SIXTEENTH.
Yes! I love justice well--as well as you do-- But since the good dame's blind, she shall excuse me If, time and reason fitting, I prove dumb;-- The breath I utter now shall be no means To take away from me my breath in future.
Old Play.
By dint of charity from the town's-people in aid of the load of provisions he had brought with him into durance, Edie Ochiltree had passed a day or two's confinement without much impatience, regretting his want of freedom the less, as the weather proved broken and rainy.
"The prison," he said, "wasna sae dooms bad a place as it was ca'd.

Ye had aye a good roof ower your head to fend aff the weather, and, if the windows werena glazed, it was the mair airy and pleasant for the summer season.

And there were folk enow to crack wi', and he had bread eneugh to eat, and what need he fash himsell about the rest o't ?" The courage of our philosophical mendicant began, however, to abate, when the sunbeams shone fair on the rusty bars of his grated dungeon, and a miserable linnet, whose cage some poor debtor had obtained permission to attach to the window, began to greet them with his whistle.
"Ye're in better spirits than I am," said Edie, addressing the bird, "for I can neither whistle nor sing for thinking o' the bonny burnsides and green shaws that I should hae been dandering beside in weather like this.

But hae--there's some crumbs t'ye, an ye are sae merry; and troth ye hae some reason to sing an ye kent it, for your cage comes by nae faut o' your ain, and I may thank mysell that I am closed up in this weary place." Ochiltree's soliloquy was disturbed by a peace-officer, who came to summon him to attend the magistrate.

So he set forth in awful procession between two poor creatures, neither of them so stout as he was himself, to be conducted into the presence of inquisitorial justice.