The wife saw the case I was in, and advised me, for the sake of the fresh air, to take a step into the bit garden, and try a hand at the spade, the smell of the new earth being likely to operate as a cordial; but no--it would not do; and when I came in at one o'clock to my dinner, the steam of the fresh broth, instead of making me feel, as usual, as hungry as a hawk, was like to turn my stomach, while the sight of the sheep's head, one of the primest ones I had seen the whole season, looked, by all the world, like the head of a boiled blackamoor, and made me as sick as a dog; so I could do nothing but take a turn out again, and swig away at the small beer, that never seemed able to slocken my drouth.
At long and last, I minded having heard Andrew Redbeak, the excise-officer, say, that nothing ever put him right after a debosh except something they call a bottle of soda-water; so my wife dispatched Benjie to the place where we knew it could be found, and he returned in a jiffie with a thing like a blacking-bottle below his daidly, as he was bidden.

There being a wire over the cork for some purpose or other, or maybe just to look neat, we had some fight to get it torn away, but at last we succeeded.

I had turned about for a jug, and the wife was rummaging for the screw, while Benjie was fiddling away with his fingers at the cork--Save us! all at once it gave a thud like thunder, driving the cork over poor Benjie's head, while it squirted there-up in his eyes like a fire-engine, and I had only just time to throw down the jug, and up with the bottle to my mouth.

Luckily, for the sixpence it cost, there was a drop left, which tasted, by all the world, just like brisk dish- washings; but for all that, it had a wonderful power of setting me to rights; and my noddle in a while began to clear up, like a March-day after a heavy shower.
I mind very well too, on the afternoon of the dividual same day, that my door-neighbour, Thomas Burlings, popped in; and, in our two-handed crack over the counter, after asking me in a dry, curious way, if I had come by no skaith in the business of the play, he said, the thing had now spread far and wide, and was making a great noise in the world.

I thought the body a wee sharp in his observes; so I pretended to take it quite lightly, proceeding in my shaping-out a pair of buckskin breeches, which I was making for one of the Duke's huntsmen; so seeing he was off the scent, he said in a more jocose way-- "Well, speaking about buckskins, I'll tell ye a good story about that." "Let us hear't," said I; for I was in that sort of queerish way, that I did not care much about being very busy.
"Ye'se get it as I heard it," quo' Thomas; "and it's no less worth telling, that it bears a good moral application in its tail; after the same fashion that a blister does good by sucking away the vicious humours of the body, thereby making the very pain it gives precious." And here--though maybe it was just my thought--the body stroked his chin, and gave me a kind of half gley, as much as saying, "take that to ye, neighbour." But I deserved it all, and could not take it ill off his hand; being, like myself, one of the elders of our kirk, and an honest enough, precise-speaking man.
"Ye see, ye ken," said Thomas, "that the Breadalbane Fencibles, a wheen Highland birkies, were put into camp at Fisherrow links, maybe for the benefit of their douking, on account of the fiddle {120}--or maybe in case the French should land at the water-mouth--or maybe to give the regiment the benefit of the sea air--or maybe to make their bare houghs hardier, for it was the winter time, frost and snaw being as plenty as ye like, and no sae scarce as pantaloons among the core--or for some ither reason, guid, bad, or indifferent, which disna muckle matter; but ye see the lang and the short o' the story is, that there they were encamped, man and mother's son of them, going through their dreels by day, and sleeping by night--the privates in their tents, and the offishers in their marquees, living in the course of nature on their usual rations of beef, and tammies, and so on.