At length the young counsel’s patience gave way, and as it threatened to carry his presence of mind and recollection along with it, Alan frankly told his father, that unless he was relieved from the infliction of his client’s personal presence and instructions, he must necessarily throw up his brief, and decline pleading the case.
‘Hush, hush, my dear Alan,’ said the old gentleman, almost at his own wit’s end upon hearing this dilemma; ‘dinna mind the silly ne’er-do-weel; we cannot keep the man from hearing his own cause, though he be not quite right in the head.’
‘On my life, sir,’ answered Alan, ‘I shall be unable to go on, he drives everything out of my remembrance; and if I attempt to speak seriously of the injuries he has sustained, and the condition he is reduced to, how can I expect but that the very appearance of such an absurd scarecrow will turn it all into ridicule?’
‘There is something in that,’ said Saunders Fairford, glancing a look at Poor Peter, and then cautiously inserting his forefinger under his bob-wig, in order to rub his temple and aid his invention; ‘he is no figure for the fore-bar to see without laughing; but how to get rid of him? To speak sense, or anything like it, is the last thing he will listen to. Stay, aye,--Alan, my darling, hae patience; I’ll get him off on the instant, like a gowff ba’.’
So saying, he hastened to his ally, Peter Drudgeit, who on seeing him with marks of haste in his gait, and care upon his countenance, clapped his pen behind his ear, with ‘What’s the stir now, Mr. Saunders? Is there aught wrang?’
‘Here’s a dollar, man,’ said Mr. Saunders; ‘now, or never, Peter, do me a good turn. Yonder’s your namesake, Peter Peebles, will drive the swine through our bonny hanks of yarn; get him over to John’s Coffeehouse, man--gie him his meridian--keep him there, drunk or sober, till the hearing is ower.’ [The simile is obvious, from the old manufacture of Scotland, when the gudewife’s thrift, as the yarn wrought in the winter was called, when laid down to bleach by the burn-side, was peculiarly exposed to the inroads of pigs, seldom well regulated about a Scottish farm-house.]
‘Eneugh said,’ quoth Peter Drudgeit, no way displeased with his own share in the service required, ‘We’se do your bidding.’