Now serious
conversation is a sort of thing that I never shone in, possibly because
my early studies were framed in a different direction; but as I really
was unwilling to offend the respectable coffin-maker, and as I found
that the Captain of M'Alcohol--a decided trump in his way--had also
received a summons, I notified my acceptance.
M'Alcohol and I went together. The captain, an enormous brawny Celt,
with superhuman whiskers and a shock of the fieriest hair, had figged
himself out, _more majorum_, in the full Highland costume. I never saw
Rob Roy on the stage look half so dignified or ferocious. He glittered
from head to foot with dirk, pistol, and skean-dhu; and at least a
hundredweight of cairngorms cast a prismatic glory around his person. I
felt quite abashed beside him.
We were ushered into Mr. Sawley's drawing-room. Round the walls, and
at considerable distances from each other, were seated about a dozen
characters, male and female, all of them dressed in sable, and wearing
countenances of woe. Sawley advanced, and wrung me by the hand with
so piteous an expression of visage that I could not help thinking some
awful catastrophe had just befallen his family.
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