"With your permission I shall go early to bed to-night," said Flemington to his host, as the three sat over their wine by the dining-room fire and the clock's hands pointed to eight.
"Fie!" said the judge; "you are a young man to be thinking of such things at this hour."
"My bones have not forgotten yesterday----" began Archie.
"And what would you do if you had to ride the circuit, sir?" exclaimed Balnillo, looking sideways at him like a sly old crow. "Man, James, you and I have had other things to consider besides our bones! And here's Mr. Flemington, who might be your son and my grandson, havering about his bed!"
"Captain Logie would need to have married young for that!" he cried. "And I cannot picture your lordship as anybody's grandfather."
"Come, Jamie, how old are you?" inquired his brother in a tone that had a light touch of gratification.
"I lose count nowadays," said James, sighing. "I must be near upon eight-and-thirty, I suppose. Life's a long business, after all."
"Yours has scarcely been long enough to have begotten me, unless you had done so at twelve years old," observed Archie.
"When I had to ride the circuit," began Balnillo, setting down his glass and joining his hands across his waistcoat, "I had many a time to stick fast in worse places than the Den yonder--ay, and to leave my horse where he was and get forward on my clerk's nag. I've been forced to sit the bench in another man's wig because my own had rolled in the water in my luggage, and was a plaster of dirt--maybe never fit to be seen again upon a Lord of Session's head."
Logie smiled with his crooked mouth. He remembered, though he did not mention, the vernacular rhyme written on that occasion by some impudent member of the junior bar:
"Auld David Balnillo gangs wantin' his wig, And he's seekin' the loan of anither as big. A modest request, an' there's naething agin' it, But he'd better hae soucht a new head to put in it!"
"It was only last year," continued his brother, "that I gave up the saddle and the bench together."
"That was more from choice than from necessity--at least, so I have heard," said Archie.
"My lord, do you think that we obscure country-folk know nothing? or that reputations don't fly farther than Edinburgh? The truth is that we of the younger generation are not made of the same stuff. That is what my grandmother tells me so often--so often that, from force of habit, I don't listen. But I have begun to believe it at last."