"Foul fa' you and your feet baith," said Mary, forgetting the resolution which she had formed only a minute ago, and nearly losing her good-humour at the same time. "I tell ye," she continued, "that I should been hame lang syne, and d'ye think that I can bide here the hale night to hear you haver nonsense."
"O Mary, Mary!" rejoined the man of exclamations, "this sets the crown on a' my misfortunes, and I'll never do mair guid. Twice owre this same night I saw you looking at Jamie Duff: ye love him, and no me. O Mary, Mary, Mary!" and therewith he threw himself down upon the earth, or rather in a puddle of dirty water by the road-side, at full length, and began to weep and groan, in great tribulation. When his inarticulate wailings would permit, he again muttered half sentences about walking over the linn or the craig, and he even threw out hints of an intention to leave the world in that most ungentlemanly manner in which the law sometimes disposes of very dissolute characters. As the liquor with which he had been drenching his system had no doubt heightened the effects of his sensibility, his sensibility now heightened the effects of the liquor; and between them he was soon in a sad state of mental as well as bodily distemperature.
Mary, who had little experience in these matters, would have readily given all the worlds which all the Alexanders and Cæsars on earth ever conquered, had she been mistress of them, for some one to assist her in conducting him to any house where he might find shelter for the night, or perhaps, as she thought, a bed on which he might breathe his last. Fortunately for her, she soon heard the noise of footsteps approaching; and, in a few minutes more, she had the satisfaction of seeing, or rather hearing, James Duff, with his convoy, which was not a merchantman, but a marriageable woman, bear down upon her.
James had been left in quiet possession of Jenny Jackson, in consequence of Andrew--who was certainly the most enamoured lover--having got rather fuddled; from which circumstance he had been left at the inn to sleep off his debauch; and, though the hands of the former were already full, he did not appear offended, nor even greatly distressed, at the accident which gave him an opportunity of again meeting Mary. He immediately lifted the fallen man from the ground, on which he was still lying in a half-senseless state, and, with the assistance of the two maidens, who, in this instance, lent their aid, "nothing loth," conducted him to the nearest house, where they left him to recover from his drench.