Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIII

Excerpt

THE LAWYER'S TALES.

LORD KAMES'S PUZZLE.

On looking over some Session papers which had belonged to Lord Kames, with the object, I confess, of getting hold of some facts—those entities called by Quintilian the bones of truth, the more by token, I fancy, that they so often stick in the throat—which might contribute to my legends, I came to some sheets whereon his lordship had written some hasty remarks, to the effect that the case Napier versus Napier was the most curious puzzle that ever he had witnessed since he had taken his seat on the bench. The papers were fragmentary, consisting of parts of a Reclaiming Petition and some portion of a Proof that had been led in support of a brieve of service; but I got enough to enable me to give the story, which I shall do in such a connected manner as to take the reader along with me, I hope pleasantly, and without any inclination to choke upon the foresaid bones.

Without being very particular about the year, which really I do not know with further precision than that it was within the first five years of Lord Kames's senator-ship, I request the reader to fancy himself in a small domicile in Toddrick's Wynd, in the old city of Edinburgh; and I request this the more readily that, as we all know, Nature does not exclude very humble places from the regions of romance, neither does she deny to very humble personages the characters of heroes and heroines. Not that I have much to say in the first instance either of the place or the persons; the former being no more than a solitary room and a bed-closet, where yet the throb of life was as strong and quick as in the mansions of the great, and the latter composed of two persons—one, a decent, hard-working woman called Mrs. Hislop, whose duty in this world was to keep her employers clean in their clothes, wherein she stood next to the minister, insomuch as cleanliness is next to godliness—in other words, she was a washerwoman; the other being a young girl, verging upon sixteen, called Henrietta, whose qualities, both of mind and body, might be comprised in the homely eulogy, "as blithe as bonnie." So it may be, that if you are alarmed at the humility of the occupation of the one—even with your remembrance that Sir Isaac Newton experimented upon soap-bubbles—as being so intractable in the plastic-work of romance, you may be appeased by the qualities of the other; for has it not been our delight to sing for a thousand years, yea, in a thousand songs, too, the praises of young damsels, whether under the names of Jenny or Peggy, or those of Clarinda or Florabella, or whether engaged in herding flocks by Logan Waters, or dispensing knights' favours under the peacock? But we cannot afford to dispose of our young heroine in this curt way, for her looks formed parts of the lines of a strange history; and so we must be permitted the privilege of narrating that, while Mrs. Hislop's protegée did not come within that charmed circle which contains, according to the poets, so many angels without wings, she was probably as fair every whit as Dowsabell....