Through a hum of talk and footfalls, the piping tones of a Macer announce a fresh cause and call upon the names of those concerned.

Intelligent men have been walking here daily for ten or twenty years without a rag of business or a shilling of reward.

In process of time, they may perhaps be made the Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or Tobermory.
There is nothing required, you would say, but a little patience and a taste for exercise and bad air.

To breathe dust and bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! But those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking, and count it the most arduous form of idleness.
More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where judges of the First Appeal sit singly, and halls of audience where the supreme Lords sit by three or four.

Here, you may see Scott's place within the bar, where he wrote many a page of Waverley novels to the drone of judicial proceeding.