 all were good enough to say it gave me an address a little more
genteel; and there is no question but I learned to manage my coat-skirts and
sword with more dexterity, and to stand in a room as though the same belonged to
me. My clothes themselves were all earnestly re-ordered; and the most trifling
circumstance, such as where I should tie my hair, or the colour of my ribbon,
debated among the three misses like a thing of weight. One way with another, no
doubt I was a good deal improved to look at, and acquired a bit of a modish air
that would have surprised the good folks at Essendean.
    The two younger misses were very willing to discuss a point of my
habiliment, because that was in the line of their chief thoughts. I cannot say
that they appeared any other way conscious of my presence; and though always
more than civil, with a kind of heartless cordiality, could not hide how much I
wearied them. As for the aunt, she was a wonderful still woman; and I think she
gave me much the same attention as she gave the rest of the family, which was
little enough. The eldest daughter and the Advocate himself were thus my
principal friends, and our familiarity was much increased by a pleasure that we
took in common. Before the court met we spent a day or two at the house of
Grange, living very nobly with an open table, and here it was that we three
began to ride out together in the fields, a practice afterwards maintained in
Edinburgh, so far as the Advocate's continual affairs permitted. When we were
put in a good frame by the briskness of the exercise, the difficulties of the
way, or the accidents of bad weather, my shyness wore entirely off; we forgot
that we were strangers, and speech not being required, it flowed the more
naturally on. Then it was that they had my story from me, bit by bit, from the
time that I left Essendean, with my voyage and battle in the Covenant,
wanderings in the heather, etc.; and from the interest they found in my
adventures sprung the circumstance of a jaunt we made a little later on, on a
day when the courts were not sitting, and of which I will tell a trifle more at
length.
    We took horse early, and passed first by the house of Shaws, where it stood
smokeless in a great field of white frost, for it was yet early in the day. Here
Prestongrange alighted down, gave me his horse, and proceeded alone to
