“You may thank this gentleman, kinsman,” said Rashleigh, “if I leave any part of my debt to you unpaid; and if I quit you now, it is only in the hope we shall soon meet again without the possibility of interruption.”

He took up his sword, wiped it, sheathed it, and was lost among the bushes.

The Scotchman, partly by force, partly by remonstrance, prevented my following him; indeed, I began to be of opinion my doing so would be to little purpose.

“As I live by bread,” said Campbell, when, after one or two struggles in which he used much forbearance towards me, he perceived me inclined to stand quiet, “I never saw sae daft a callant! I wad hae gien the best man in the country the breadth o’ his back gin he had gien me sic a kemping as ye hae dune. What wad ye do?—Wad ye follow the wolf to his den?—I tell ye, man, he has the auld trap set for ye—He has got the collector-creature Morris to bring up a’ the auld story again, and ye maun look for nae help frae me here, as ye got at Justice Inglewood’s—It isna good for my health to come in the gate o’ the whigamore bailie bodies. Now gang your ways hame, like a guid bairn—jouk and let the jaw gae by—Keep out o’ sight o’ Rashleigh, and Morris, and that MacVittie animal—Mind the Clachan of Aberfoil, as I said before, and, by the word of a gentleman, I wunna see ye wranged. But keep a calm sough till we meet again—I maun gae and get Rashleigh out o’ the town afore waur comes o’t, for the neb o’ him’s never out o’ mischief—Mind the Clachan of Aberfoil.”

He turned upon his heel, and left me to meditate on the singular events which had befallen me. My first care was to adjust my dress and re-assume my cloak, disposing it so as to conceal the blood which flowed down my right side. I had scarcely accomplished this, when, the classes of the College being dismissed, the gardens began to be filled with parties of the students. I therefore left them as soon as possible; and in my way towards Mr. Jarvie’s, whose dinner hour was now approaching, I stopped at a small unpretending shop, the sign of which intimated the indweller to be Christopher Nielson, surgeon and apothecary. I requested of a little boy who was pounding some stuff in a mortar, that he would procure me an audience of this learned pharmacopolist. He opened the door of the back-shop, where I found a lively elderly man, who shook his head incredulously at some idle account I gave him of having been wounded accidentally by the button breaking off my antagonist’s foil while I was engaged in a fencing match. When he had applied some lint and somewhat else he thought proper to the trifling wound I had received, he observed, “There never was button on the foil that made this hurt. Ah! young blood! young blood!—But we surgeons are a secret generation—If it werena for hot blood and ill blood, what would become of the twa learned faculties?”

With which moral reflection he dismissed me; and I experienced very little pain or inconvenience afterwards from the scratch I had received.