Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes and Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that green and quiet resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman who had lived for sixty years, and been known for nothing but good butter and a godly conversation, was to be rooted from her grave at midnight and carried, dead and naked, to that far-away city that she had always honoured with her Sunday''s
best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to be exposed to that last curiosity of the anatomist.
Late one afternoon the pair set forth, well wrapped in cloaks and furnished with a formidable bottle. It rained without remission - a cold, dense, lashing
rain. Now and again there blew a puff of wind, but these sheets of falling water
kept it down. Bottle and all, it was a sad and silent drive as far as Penicuik, where they were to spend the evening. They stopped once, to hide their implements in a thick bush not far from the churchyard, and once again at the Fisher''s Tryst, to have a toast before the kitchen fire and vary their nips of whisky with a
glass of ale. When they reached their journey''s end the gig was housed, the horse was fed and comforted, and the two young doctors in a private room sat down to the best dinner and the best wine the house afforded. The
lights, the fire, the beating rain upon the window, the cold, incongruous work that lay before them, added zest to their enjoyment of the meal. With every glass their cordiality increased. Soon Macfarlane handed a
little pile of gold to his companion.
''A compliment,'' he said. ''Between friends these little d-d accommodations ought to fly like pipe-lights.''
Fettes pocketed the money, and
applauded the sentiment to the echo. ''You are a philosopher,'' he cried. ''I was an ass till I knew you. You and K- between you, by the Lord Harry! but you''ll make a man of me.''
''Of course we shall,'' applauded Macfarlane. ''A man? I tell you, it required a man to back me up the other morning. There are some big, brawling, forty-year-old cowards who would have turned sick at the look of the d-d thing; but not you - you kept your head. I watched you.''
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