Hastily, that he might forestall sleep in the brain of the soutar, he undid his parcel, and after carefully enveloping his own violin in the paper, took the old wife of the soutar, and proceeded to perform upon her a trick which in a merry moment his master had taught him, and which, not without some feeling of irreverence, he had occasionally practised upon his own bonny lady.
The shoemaker's room was overhead; its thin floor of planks was the ceiling of the workshop.

Ere Dooble Sanny was well laid by the side of his sleeping wife, he heard a frightful sound from below, as of some one tearing his beloved violin to pieces.

No sound of rending coffin-planks or rising dead would have been so horrible in the ears of the soutar.
He sprang from his bed with a haste that shook the crazy tenement to its foundation.
The moment Robert heard that, he put the violin in its place, and took his station by the door-cheek.

The soutar came tumbling down the stair, and rushed at the door, but found that he had to go back for the key.
When, with uncertain hand, he had opened at length, he went straight to the nest of his treasure, and Robert slipping out noiselessly, was in the next street before Dooble Sanny, having found the fiddle uninjured, and not discovering the substitution, had finished concluding that the whisky and his imagination had played him a very discourteous trick between them, and retired once more to bed.

And not till Robert had cut his foot badly with a piece of glass, did he discover that he had left his shoes behind him.