With horror they bore it out of sight of the monastery of which he had
been so unworthy a brother. A cleansing fire burned it to ashes, and a
shrewd, clean wind that blew from over the Lammermoors swept away all
trace of the accursed thing. No pestilence came to Melrose. Perchance in
the twelfth century it was by prayer and fasting that the holy men won
the day.
A BORDER MIDDY
One blustering February evening towards the close of the eighteenth
century there sat in a back room in a little inn at Portsmouth three
midshipmen, forlorn-looking and depressed to a degree quite at variance
with the commonly accepted idea of the normal mental condition of
midshipmen. It was a room, not in the famous "Blue Posts"--that hostelry
beloved by lads of their rank in the service--but in a smaller, meaner,
less frequented house in a very different quarter of the town, a quarter
none too savoury, if the truth were told.
Why they had betaken themselves to this particular tavern in preference
to that generally used by them, who can say. Perhaps--as Peter Simple's
coachman remarked on that occasion when Peter first made acquaintance
with Portsmouth--perhaps it was because they had too often "forgotten to
pay for their breakfastesses" at the "Blue Posts," and had not the
wherewithal to pay up arrears.
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