CHAPTER XI.
NARRATIVE OF ALAN FAIRFORD, CONTINUED Five minutes had elapsed after the town clock struck two, before Alan Fairford, who had made a small detour to put his letter into the post-house, reached the mansion of Mr.Provost Crosbie, and was at once greeted by the voice of that civic dignitary, and the rural dignitary his visitor, as by the voices of men impatient for their dinner.
'Come away, Mr.Fairford--the Edinburgh time is later than ours,' said the provost.
And, 'Come away, young gentleman,' said the laird; 'I remember your father weel at the Cross thirty years ago--I reckon you are as late in Edinburgh as at London, four o'clock hours--eh ?' 'Not quite so degenerate,' replied Fairford; 'but certainly many Edinburgh people are so ill-advised as to postpone their dinner till three, that they may have full time to answer their London correspondents.' 'London correspondents!' said Mr.Maxwell; 'and pray what the devil have the people of Auld Reekie to do with London correspondents ?' [Not much in those days, for within my recollection the London post; was brought north in a small mail-cart; and men are yet as live who recollect when it came down with only one single letter for Edinburgh, addressed to the manager of the British Linen Company.] 'The tradesmen must have their goods,' said Fairford.
'Can they not buy our own Scottish manufactures, and pick their customers pockets in a more patriotic manner ?' 'Then the ladies must have fashions,' said Fairford.
'Can they not busk the plaid over their heads, as their mothers did?
A tartan screen, and once a year a new cockernony from Paris, should serve a countess.

But ye have not many of them left, I think--Mareschal, Airley, Winton, Vemyss, Balmerino, all passed and gone--aye, aye, the countesses and ladies of quality will scarce take up too much of your ball-room floor with their quality hoops nowadays.' 'There is no want of crowding, however, sir,' said Fairford; 'they begin to talk of a new Assembly room.' 'A new Assembly room!' said the old Jacobite laird--'Umph--I mind quartering three hundred men in the old Assembly room [I remember hearing this identical answer given by an old Highland gentleman of the Forty-Five, when he heard of the opening of the New Assembly Rooms in George Street.]--But come, come--I'll ask no more questions--the answers all smell of new lords new lands, and do but spoil my appetite, which were a pity, since here comes Mrs.Crosbie to say our mutton's ready.' It was even so.

Mrs.Crosbie had been absent, like Eve, 'on hospitable cares intent,' a duty which she did not conceive herself exempted from, either by the dignity of her husband's rank in the municipality, or the splendour of her Brussels silk gown, or even by the more highly prized lustre of her birth; for she was born a Maxwell, and allied, as her husband often informed his friends, to several of the first families in the county.

She had been handsome, and was still a portly, good-looking woman of her years; and though her peep into the kitchen had somewhat heightened her complexion, it was no more than a modest touch of rouge might have done.
The provost was certainly proud of his lady, nay, some said he was afraid of her; for of the females of the Redgauntlet family there went a rumour, that, ally where they would, there was a grey mare as surely in the stables of their husbands, as there is a white horse in Wouvermans' pictures.

The good dame, too, was supposed to have brought a spice of politics into Mr.Crosbie's household along with her; and the provost's enemies at the council-table of the burgh used to observe that he uttered there many a bold harangue against the Pretender, and in favour of King George and government, of which he dared not have pronounced a syllable in his own bedchamber; and that, in fact, his wife's predominating influence had now and then occasioned his acting, or forbearing to act, in a manner very different from his general professions of zeal for Revolution principles.