But of course the unfortunate of St.
Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had no
uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by his trade and stood
(in the mediaeval phrase) quite out of the danger of my father; but
he had a painful interview for all that, and perspired extremely.
From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir. My father had
announced we were "to post," and the phrase called up in my hopeful
mind visions of top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's DANCE OF
DEATH; but it was only a jingling cab that came to the inn door,
such as I had driven in a thousand times at the low price of one
shilling on the streets of Edinburgh. Beyond this disappointment,
I remember nothing of that drive. It is a road I have often
travelled, and of not one of these journeys do I remember any
single trait. The fact has not been suffered to encroach on the
truth of the imagination. I still see Magus Muir two hundred years
ago; a desert place, quite uninclosed; in the midst, the primate's
carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in
pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first. No scene
of history has ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not
because Balfour, that questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin
of my own; not because of the pleadings of the victim and his
daughter; not even because of the live bum-bee that flew out of
Sharpe's 'bacco-box, thus clearly indicating his complicity with
Satan; nor merely because, as it was after all a crime of a fine
religious flavour, it figured in Sunday books and afforded a
grateful relief from MINISTERING CHILDREN or the MEMOIRS OF MRS.
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