The Heart of Mid-Lothian - Penn State University

“Is it only you, and be d—d to you?” answered the
fiscal, still more disappointed— “what made you leave
the woman?”
“She told me she saw Robertson go into the ruins, so I
made what haste I could to cleek the callant.”
“It’s all over now,” said Sharpitlaw; “we shall see no
more of him to-night; but he shall hide himself in a
bean-hool, if he remains on Scottish ground without
my finding him. Call back the people, Ratcliffe.”
Ratcliffe hollowed to the dispersed officers, who willingly
obeyed the signal; for probably there was no individual
among them who would have been much desirous
of a rencontre, hand to hand, and at a distance from
his comrades, with such an active and desperate fellow
as Robertson.
“And where are the two women?” said Sharpitlaw.
“Both made their heels serve them, I suspect,” replied
Ratcliffe, and he hummed the end of the old song—
“Then hey play up the rin-awa bride,
For she has taen the gee.”
Sir Walter Scott
“One woman,” said Sharpitlaw,—for, like all rogues,
he was a great calumniator of the fair sex,*— “one
woman is enough to dark the fairest ploy that was ever
planned; and how could I be such an ass as to expect to
carry through a job that had two in it?
But we know how to come by them both, if they are
wanted, that’s one good thing.”
Accordingly, like a defeated general, sad and sulky, he
led back his discomfited forces to the metropolis, and
dismissed them for the night.
The next morning early, he was under the necessity of
making his report to the sitting magistrate of the day.
The gentleman who occupied the chair of office on this
occasion (for the bailies, Anglice’, aldermen, take it by
rotation) chanced to be the same by whom Butler was
committed, a person very generally respected among his
fellow-citizens. Something he was of a humorist, and
rather deficient in general education; but acute, patient,
and upright, possessed of a fortune acquired by honest
* Note L. Calumniator of the Fair Sex.
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