He was indeed an important person, as was testified by his portly appearance; his hat laced with POINT D'ESPAGNE; his coat and waistcoat once richly embroidered, though now almost threadbare; the splendour of his solitaire, and laced ruffles, though the first was sorely creased, and the other sullied; not to forget the length of his silver-hilted rapier.

His wit, or rather humour, bordered on the sarcastic, and intimated a discontented man; and although he showed no displeasure when the provost attempted a repartee, yet it seemed that he permitted it upon mere sufferance, as a fencing-master, engaged with a pupil, will sometimes permit the tyro to hit him, solely by way of encouragement.

The laird's own jests, in the meanwhile, were eminently successful, not only with the provost and his lady, but with the red-cheeked and red-ribboned servant-maid who waited at table, and who could scarce perform her duty with propriety, so effectual were the explosions of Summertrees.

Alan Fairford alone was unmoved among all this mirth; which was the less wonderful, that, besides the important subject which occupied his thoughts, most of the laird's good things consisted in sly allusions to little parochial or family incidents, with which the Edinburgh visitor was totally unacquainted: so that the laughter of the party sounded in his ear like the idle crackling of thorns under the pot, with this difference, that they did not accompany or second any such useful operation as the boiling thereof.
Fairford was glad when the cloth was withdrawn; and when Provost Crosbie (not without some points of advice from his lady touching the precise mixture of the ingredients) had accomplished the compounding of a noble bowl of punch, at which the old Jacobite's eyes seemed to glisten, the glasses were pushed round it, filled, and withdrawn each by its owner, when the provost emphatically named the toast, 'The King,' with an important look to Fairford, which seemed to say, You can have no doubt whom I mean, and therefore there is no occasion to particularize the individual.
Summertrees repeated the toast, with a sly wink to the lady, while Fairford drank his glass in silence.
'Well, young advocate,' said the landed proprietor, 'I am glad to see there is some shame, if there is little honesty, left in the Faculty.
Some of your black gowns, nowadays, have as little of the one as of the other.' 'At least, sir,' replied Mr.Fairford, 'I am so much of a lawyer as not willingly to enter into disputes which I am not retained to support--it would be but throwing away both time and argument.' 'Come, come,' said the lady, 'we will have no argument in this house about Whig or Tory--the provost kens what he maun SAY, and I ken what he should THINK; and for a' that has come and gane yet, there may be a time coming when honest men may say what they think, whether they be provosts or not.' 'D'ye hear that, provost ?' said Summertrees; 'your wife's a witch, man; you should nail a horseshoe on your chamber door--Ha, ha, ha!' This sally did not take quite so well as former efforts of the laird's wit.

The lady drew up, and the provost said, half aside, 'The sooth bourd is nae bourd.