"Wha kens?" answered he; "they're queer devils;—maybe I might just have 'scaped ae gang to meet the other. And yet I'll no say that neither; for if that randy wife was coming to Charlies-hope, she should have a pint bottle o' brandy and a pound o' tobacco to wear her through the winter. They're queer devils, as my auld father used to say—they're warst where they're warst guided—there's baith gude and ill about the gypsies."
This, and some other desultory conversation, served as a "shoeing-horn" to draw on another cup of ale and another cheerer, as Dinmont termed it in his country phrase, of brandy and water. Brown then resolutely declined all farther conviviality for that evening, pleading his own uneasiness and the effects of the skirmish,—being well aware that it would have availed nothing to have remonstrated with his host on the danger that excess might have occasioned to his own raw wound and his bloody coxcomb. A
