The Heart of Mid-Lothian - Penn State University

usher. A similarity of taste begot kindness, and accordingly
he saw Butler’s increasing debility with great compassion,
roused up his own energies to teaching the school
in the morning hours, insisted upon his assistant’s reposing
himself at that period, and, besides, supplied him
with such comforts as the patient’s situation required,
and his own means were inadequate to compass.
Such was Butler’s situation, scarce able to drag himself
to the place where his daily drudgery must gain his
daily bread, and racked with a thousand fearful anticipations
concerning the fate of those who were dearest
to him in the world, when the trial and condemnation
of Effie Deans put the copestone upon his mental misery.
He had a particular account of these events, from a
fellow-student who resided in the same village, and who,
having been present on the melancholy occasion, was
able to place it in all its agony of horrors before his excruciated
imagination. That sleep should have visited
his eyes after such a curfew-note, was impossible. A thousand
dreadful visions haunted his imagination all night,
Sir Walter Scott
331
and in the morning he was awaked from a feverish slumber,
by the only circumstance which could have added
to his distress,—the visit of an intrusive ass.
This unwelcome visitant was no other than Bartoline
Saddletree. The worthy and sapient burgher had kept
his appointment at MacCroskie’s with Plumdamas and
some other neighbours, to discuss the Duke of Argyle’s
speech, the justice of Effie Deans’s condemnation, and
the improbability of her obtaining a reprieve. This sage
conclave disputed high and drank deep, and on the next
morning Bartoline felt, as he expressed it, as if his head
was like a “confused progress of writs.”
To bring his reflective powers to their usual serenity,
Saddle-tree resolved to take a morning’s ride upon a certain
hackney, which he, Plumdamas, and another honest
shopkeeper, combined to maintain by joint subscription,
for occasional jaunts for the purpose of business
or exercise. As Saddletree had two children boarded with
Whackbairn, and was, as we have seen, rather fond of
Butler’s society, he turned his palfrey’s head towards
Liberton, and came, as we have already said, to give the