would liken to Hob. "He minds me o' the laird there," he would say. "He
has some of Hob's grand, whunstane sense, and the same way with him of
steiking his mouth when he's no very pleased." And Hob, all
unconscious, would draw down his upper lip and produce, as if for
comparison, the formidable grimace referred to. The unsatisfactory
incumbent of St. Enoch's Kirk was thus briefly dismissed: "If he had but
twa fingers o' Gib's, he would waken them up." And Gib, honest man!
would look down and secretly smile. Clem was a spy whom they had sent
out into the world of men. He had come back with the good news that
there was nobody to compare with the Four Black Brothers, no position
that they would not adorn, no official that it would not be well they
should replace, no interest of mankind, secular or spiritual, which
would not immediately bloom under their supervision. The excuse of
their folly is in two words: scarce the breadth of a hair divided them
from the peasantry. The measure of their sense is this: that these
symposia of rustic vanity were kept entirely within the family, like
some secret ancestral practice. To the world their serious faces were
never deformed by the suspicion of any simper of self-contentment. Yet
it was known. "They hae a guid pride o' themsel's!" was the word in the
country-side.

Lastly, in a Border story, there should be added their "two-names." Hob
was The Laird. "Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne"; he was the laird of
Cauldstaneslap - say fifty acres - IPSISSIMUS. Clement was Mr. Elliott,
as upon his door-plate, the earlier Dafty having been discarded as no
longer applicable, and indeed only a reminder of misjudgment and the
imbecility of the public; and the youngest, in honour of his perpetual
wanderings, was known by the sobriquet of Randy Dand.

It will be understood that not all this information was communicated by