Thomas Elliot and Jenny were married, but she died the second year after their marriage, leaving to his charge an infant son, who was kirsened by the name of Alexander. Thomas, after his wife's death, tried many things (for while she lived she keepit him to rights), but he neglected them all. He began twenty things, and ended nothing. He was to be found in Luckie Riddle's in the morning, and he was to be seen sitting there at night. Before he was forty, he became a perfect sot; and I used to ask, "Wha leads him away now." The fact was, he was miserable save when he was in company; and, for the sake of company, he would have sat sipping and drinking from sunrise to sunset, without ever perceiving that in that time he had been sitting wi' twenty different companies, each of whom had remained maybe half-an-hour, and left him bibbing there to make a crony of the customer that last came in. But this course of life could not last long. He had mortgaged the mortgage that his father left him, until, although he could not lift it, he had almost swallowed it up; and at the age of forty-four he fell into the grave like a lump of diseased flesh--a thing without a soul!
I have informed ye that he left a son, named Alexander, behind him. He was a laddie that was beloved by the whole town; and it was him that frae bairnhood was set down as the future husband of Esther Anderson, our minister's daughter. I have already told ye how he enlisted, when he fancied that she was drawing up wi' the young laird, and slighting him.
Now, mark ye, sir--for this is one of the most singular things in the history of our village--about three years after the melancholy deaths of Esther and her father, the laird, wi' a pack o' young men as thoughtless and wicked as himself, came down to the Ha'. It was plain as noonday that the murder of a young lassie, her bairn, and her honoured father, had never cost the young libertine a thought. He returned to all his former profligacy, as a sow returns to its wallowing in the mire.
He was returning, towards evening, with three or four of his companions from an otter-hunt, and was within a quarter-of-a-mile of the Ha', when he was met by two strangers--the one a youth, and the other a man of middle age.