of course. The pack proved to have resisted the elements,
and a suit of clothes and slippers were provided by the house.
Dickson, after a glass of toddy, wallowed in a hot bath, which
washed all the stiffness out of him. He had a fire in his bedroom,
beside which he wrote the opening passages of that diary he had
vowed to keep, descanting lyrically upon the joys of ill weather.
At seven o'clock, warm and satisfied in soul, and with his body clad
in raiment several sizes too large for it, he descended to dinner.

At one end of the long table in the dining-room sat a group of anglers.
They looked jovial fellows, and Dickson would fain have joined them;
but, having been fishing all day in the Lock o' the Threshes,
they were talking their own talk, and he feared that his admiration
for Izaak Walton did not qualify him to butt into the erudite
discussions of fishermen. The landlord seemed to think likewise,
for he drew back a chair for him at the other end, where sat a young
man absorbed in a book. Dickson gave him good evening, and got an
abstracted reply. The young man supped the Black Bull's excellent
broth with one hand, and with the other turned the pages of his volume.
A glance convinced Dickson that the work was French, a literature which
did not interest him. He knew little of the tongue and suspected it of
impropriety.

Another guest entered and took the chair opposite the bookish
young man. He was also young--not more than thirty-three--and to
Dickson's eye was the kind of person he would have liked to resemble.
He was tall and free from any superfluous flesh; his face was lean,
fine-drawn, and deeply sunburnt, so that the hair above showed oddly
pale; the hands were brown and beautifully shaped, but the forearm
revealed by the loose cuffs of his shirt was as brawny as a