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.