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its ordinary labour. The carter himself was dressed in a plaid, wrapped round his body, with a portion of it thrown over his left shoulder; and every now and then, as the wind or attention to his horse either blew it off or removed its order, he would turn himself round to adjust his mantle; and this having been done, the poor horse received some six or eight hearty thumps with what had once been part of a flail. The harness of the cart was of osier, very firmly twisted and knotted together; and the "branks" happening unfortunately to give way, before they got far from the baillie's door, a rope made from the manes and tails of horses supplied its place; but what made the harness of this cart peculiarly grotesque, was the horse-collar and crupper, which were made of straw; and to save the mangled back of the poor animal, the cart saddle had placed, under it, a parcel of old rags, and Lerwick was covered

with an old great coat and blanket. The poor carter had not met with the great Lexicographer and Hebridean. tourist, else he might have been instructed to make his poor beast's graith of "nettles;" but this was the most wretched machine the island owned, and the carter got four-pence for driv-. ing Lerwick to the tolbooth.

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Lerwick was now safely locked up in the tolbooth. A very strong bar of iron had been fixed into the floor of the cell; the irons which were fastened on his legs communicated with this bar, and slided along it by a ring. There was a heavy chain, that had once moored a custom-house boat, employed to chain Lerwick to this bar; and he was now thought quite secure.

As the window of the cell was accessible from the street, all the bare-headed and bare legged little boys came to peep in at the window to see the pedler. The little pot-bellied boy, wit

his hair docked, and hanging over his forehead like old Time in the picture, came with his little bare-headed sister, and was met at the window by another little brat, with its coarse vest buttoned down the back, to prevent the little urchin from getting it off; they came to see a murderer: their infant duty to the laird of the Caim of St. Clyde brought them to this spot.

But they were kings in cleanliness to the little wretches found in the streets of London; and the little islander and his pretty, artless, red-haired little sister, were an angel and cherub in heart and conduct, to the shocking little miscreants that prowl from Hyde Park corner to Ratcliffe highway; and we have only instanced the little islander to show what interest all the human beings of this speck in the ocean took in the death of St. Clyde.

CHAPTER IX.

With faltering voice

He spake; and after he had ceased from speech,
His lip was quivering still.

SOUTHEY'S RODERICK.

AFTER Lerwick's first escape, the pavement of the cell he was confined in had been very securely rivetted, stone to stone, by iron clasps sunk flush with the surface of the stone; hence the whole might as easily be removed as one piece. The door it was not possible to make stronger or more secure; for besides being lined with amazingly strong sheet iron, it was full set of largeheaded nails very firmly rivetted on both sides; and the two locks on the inside were of the very best workman

ship, and Vulcan himself could not have put them more securely on. The window of the cell had sashes in it, and on the outside of these were some iron bars which were deemed sufficiently strong to prevent any man from getting out; and indeed they were so, if intersecting each other at right angles, and at the small distance of four inches separate and seven-eighths of an inch square, could be any thing of a grating to keep from escape a desperado like this Lerwick.

The public mind had just begun to subside from the extravagant joy it had dipped into by the second seizure of Lerwick, and the people looked forward to the circuit of the Judges as the period of their wishes for vengeance on his head; when on the morning of the fourth day of his confinement, the iron bars of the window were seen to be cut away; and on looking into the

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