CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET 



with as grave an aspect as suits that solemn office, 

 needs not much persuasion to let the flail rest for 

 one day, anxious though he be to show the first aits 

 in the market; and donning his broad blue bonnet, 

 and the shortest-tailed auld coat he can find, and 

 taking his kent in his hand, he gruffly gives Wully 

 his orders for a** things about the place, and sets off" 

 with the younkers for a holyday. Not a man on earth 

 who has not his own pastime, depend on't, austere 

 as he may look; and 'twould be well for this wicked 

 world if no elder in it had a "sin that maist easily 

 beset him,"" worse than what Gibby Watson's wife 

 used to call his "awfu' fondness for the Grews''! 



And who that loves to walk or wander over the 

 green earth, except indeed it merely be some sonnet- 

 teer or ballad-monger, if he had time and could afford 

 it, and lived in a tolerably open country, would not 

 keep, at the very least, three greyhounds? No better 

 eating than a hare, though old blockhead Burton — 

 and he was a blockhead, if blockhead ever there was 

 one in this world — in his Anatomy, chooses to call 

 it melancholy meat. Did he ever, by way of giving 

 dinner a fair commencement, swallow a tureen of 

 hare-soup with half-a-peck of mealy potatoes? If ever 

 he did — and notwithstanding called hare melancholy 

 meat, there can be no occasion whatever for now wish- 

 ing him any further punishment. If he never did — • 

 [33] 



