among awls, lumps of rosin for his violin, masses of the same
substance wrought into shoemaker's wax for his ends, and packets of
boar's bristles, commonly called birse, for the same.

'Are thae a' ae body's?' asked Robert.

'Troth are they. They're a' hers, I wat. Ye wad hae thocht she had
been gaein' to The Bothie; but gin she had been that, there wad hae
been a cairriage to meet her,' said Crookit Caumill, the ostler.

The Bothie was the name facetiously given by Alexander, Baron
Rothie, son of the Marquis of Boarshead, to a house he had built in
the neighbourhood, chiefly for the accommodation of his bachelor
friends from London during the shooting-season.

'Haud yer tongue, Caumill,' said the shoemaker. 'She's nae sic
cattle, yon.'

'Haud up the bit bowat (stable-lantern), man, and lat Robert here
see the direction upo' them. Maybe he'll mak' something o't. He's
a fine scholar, ye ken,' said another of the bystanders.

The ostler held the lantern to the card upon one of the boxes, but
Robert found only an M., followed by something not very definite,
and a J., which might have been an I., Rothieden, Driftshire,
Scotland.

As he was not immediate with his answer, Peter Lumley, one of the
group, a lazy ne'er-do-weel, who had known better days, but never
better manners, and was seldom quite drunk, and seldomer still quite