disparity of
outward favour, than the romancer has given us to understand. The rest of the
room was panelled, or wainscotted, with black oak, against which hung two or
three portraits in armour, being characters in Scottish history, favourites of
Mr. Oldbuck, and as many in tie-wigs and laced coats, staring representatives of
his own ancestors. A large old-fashioned oaken table was covered with a
profusion of papers, parchments, books, and nondescript trinkets and gewgaws,
which seemed to have little to recommend them, besides rust and the antiquity
which it indicates. In the midst of this wreck of ancient books and utensils,
with a gravity equal to Marius among the ruins of Carthage, sat a large black
cat, which, to a superstitious eye, might have presented the genius loci, the
tutelar demon of the apartment. The floor, as well as the table and chairs, was
overflowed by the same mare magnum of miscellaneous trumpery, where it would
have been as impossible to find any individual article wanted, as to put it to
any use when discovered.
    Amid this medley, it was no easy matter to find one's way to a chair,
without stumbling over a prostrate folio, or the still more awkward mischance of
overturning some piece of Roman or ancient British pottery. And, when the chair
was attained, it had to be disencumbered, with a careful hand, of engravings
which might have received damage, and of antique spurs and buckles, which would
certainly have occasioned it to any sudden occupant. Of this the Antiquary made
Lovel particularly aware, adding, that his friend, the Rev. Doctor Heavysterne
from the Low Countries, had sustained much injury by sitting down suddenly and
incautiously on three ancient calthrops, or craw-taes, which had been lately dug
up in the bog near Bannockburn, and which, dispersed by Robert Bruce to lacerate
the feet of the English chargers, came thus in process of time to endamage the
sitting part of a learned professor of Utrecht.
    Having at length fairly settled himself, and being nothing loath to make
inquiry concerning the strange objects around him, which his host was equally
ready, as far as possible, to explain, Lovel was introduced to a large club, or
bludgeon, with an iron spike at the end of it, which, it seems, had been lately
found in a field on the Monkbarns property, adjacent to an old burying-ground.
It had mightily the air of such a stick as the Highland reapers use to walk with
on their annual peregrinations from their mountains; but Mr. Oldbuck was