G. Tawse

“ In an apartment, certainly spacious in extent, but scarcely made visible by one guttering candle stuck in a bottle, were an overcrowded mass of wretched beings sleeping on miserable beds spread out upon the floor, or squatted or reclining upon the cold unfurnished boards.
Stepping over a prostrate quarrelling drunkard, I found little Sandy on a bed of carpenter’s shavings on the floor. He was still in his rags, and a torn and scanty coverlet had been thrown over him. Poor lad! ”

“ We were stopped near the University by a crowd congregated round some wretch brought to grief by the race-horse pace of a butcher’s cart. A working man raised something in his arms, and, followed by the crowd, bore it off.
“It was over thereabouts, Phillips,” I said during the block-up, “that Lord Darnley, of exalted memory, was blown up in the Kirk o’ the Fields, to which sky-rocketing Mary of Scotland and the Isles, Regina, his beauteous, loving, and ill-starred spouse, was said to be a privy and consenting party.” ”

“ He stood for a few minutes diving and rummaging into the recesses of his rags; at last little Tom Thumb said:
“Are you the gentleman that boucht fewzees frae Sandy yesterday?”
“Yes, my little man.”
“Weel here’s sevenpence (counting out divers copper coins) , Sandy canna come; he’s no weel; a cart ran ow'r him the day, and broken his legs, and lost his bannet, and his fewzees, and your fourpence-piece, and his knife, and he’s no weel. He’s no weel ava, and the doc—tor says—says he’s dee—dee—in, and—and that’s a’ he can gie you, noo.” ”