his horse accommodated,—then returned to the house, and, seating himself in the public room, (for to request one to himself would, in these days, have been thought an overweening degree of conceit,) he found himself in the very apartment in which he had some years before celebrated his victory at the game of the popinjay, a jocular preferment which led to so many serious consequences.
He felt himself, as may well be suppossed, a much changed man since that festivity; and yet, to look around him, the groups assembled in the Howff seemed not dissimilar to those which the same scene had formerly presented. Two or three burghers husbanded their "dribbles o' brandy;" two or three dragoons lounged over their muddy ale, and cursed the inactive times that allowed them no better cheer. Their Cornet did not, indeed, play at backgammon with the curate in his cassock, but he drank a little modicum of aqua mirabilis with the grey-cloaked pres-
