Chapter 16

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. The people,
as the aged prisoner was led along by his decrepit guards, exclaimed to
each other, "Eh! see sic a grey-haired man as that is, to have committed
a highway robbery, wi' ae fit in the grave!"--And the children
congratulated the officers, objects of their alternate dread and sport,
Puggie Orrock and Jock Ormston, on having a prisoner as old as
themselves.

Thus marshalled forward, Edie was presented (by no means for the first
time) before the worshipful Bailie Littlejohn, who, contrary to what his
name expressed, was a tall portly magistrate, on whom corporation crusts
had not been conferred in vain. He was a zealous loyalist of that zealous
time, somewhat rigorous and peremptory in the execution of his duty, and
a good deal inflated with the sense of his own power and importance;--
otherwise an