His waistcoat was low in the neck, and had flap pouches, wherein he kept his mull for rappee, and his tobacco-box.

To look at him, with his rig-and-fur Shetland hose pulled up over his knees, and his big glancing buckles in his shoon, sitting at our door-cheek, clean and tidy as he was kept, was just as if one of the ancient patriarchs had been left on earth, to let succeeding survivors witness a picture of hoary and venerable eld.

Poor body, many a bit Gibraltar-rock and gingerbread did he give to me, as he would pat me on the head, and prophesy I would be a great man yet; and sing me bits of old songs about the bloody times of the Rebellion, and Prince Charlie.
There was nothing that I liked so well as to hear him set a going with his auld-warld stories and lilts; though my mother used sometimes to say, "Wheest, granfaither, ye ken it's no canny to let out a word of thae things; let byganes be byganes, and forgotten." He never liked to give trouble, so a rebuke of this kind would put a tether to his tongue for a wee; but, when we were left by ourselves, I used aye to egg him on to tell me what he had come through in his far-away travels beyond the broad seas; and of the famous battles he had seen and shed his precious blood in; for his pinkie was hacked off by a dragoon of Cornel Gardener's, down by at Prestonpans, and he had catched a bullet with his ankle over in the north at Culloden.

So it was no wonder that he liked to crack about these times, though they had brought him muckle and no little mischief, having obliged him to skulk like another Cain among the Highland hills and heather, for many a long month and day, homeless and hungry.

Not dauring to be seen in his own country, where his head would have been chacked off like a sybo, he took leg-bail in a ship over the sea, among the Dutch folk; where he followed out his lawful trade of a cooper, making girrs for the herring barrels and so on; and sending, when he could find time and opportunity, such savings from his wages as he could afford, for the maintenance of his wife and small family of three helpless weans, that he had been obligated to leave, dowie and destitute, at their native home of pleasant Dalkeith.
At long and last, when the breeze had blown over, and the feverish pulse of the country began to grow calm and cool, auld granfaither took a longing to see his native land; and though not free of jeopardy from king's cutters on the sea, and from spies on shore, he risked his neck over in a sloop from Rotterdam to Aberlady, that came across with a valuable cargo of smuggled gin.