ingratitude and cruelty!"

All the while, I was growing worse and worse. Once I had fallen, my leg

simply doubling under me, and this had struck Alan for the moment; but I

was afoot so briskly, and set off again with such a natural manner,

that he soon forgot the incident. Flushes of heat went over me, and then

spasms of shuddering. The stitch in my side was hardly bearable. At last

I began to feel that I could trail myself no farther: and with that,

there came on me all at once the wish to have it out with Alan, let my

anger blaze, and be done with my life in a more sudden manner. He had

just called me "Whig." I stopped.

"Mr. Stewart," said I, in a voice that quivered like a fiddle-string,

"you are older than I am, and should know your manners. Do you think

it either very wise or very witty to cast my politics in my teeth? I

thought, where folk differed, it was the part of gentlemen to differ

civilly; and if I did not, I may tell you I could find a better taunt

than some of yours."

Alan had stopped opposite to me, his hat cocked, his hands in his

breeches pockets, his head a little on one side. He listened, smiling

evilly, as I could see by the starlight; and when I had done he began to

whistle a Jacobite air. It was the air made in mockery of General Cope's

defeat at Preston Pans:

"Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye waukin' yet?

And are your drums a-beatin' yet?"

And it came in my mind that Alan, on the day of that battle, had been

engaged upon the royal side.

"Why do ye take that air, Mr. Stewart?" said I. "Is that to remind me

you have been beaten on both sides?"

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