He undertook my cause,
with the assistance of a solicitor of a character similar
to his own. My quondam doer had ensconced
himself chin-deep among legal trenches, hornworks,
and, covered ways; but my two protectors shelled
him out of his defences, and I was at length a free
man, at liberty to go or stay wheresoever my mind
listed.
I left my lodgings as hastily as if it had been a
pest-house; I did not even stop to receive some
change that was due to me on settling with my
landlady, and I saw the poor woman stand at her
door looking after my precipitate flight, and shaking
her head as she wrapped the silver which she
was counting for me in a separate piece of paper,
apart from the store in her own moleskin purse.
An honest Highlandwoman was Janet MacEvoy,
and deserved a greater remuneration, had I possessed
the power of bestowing it. But my eagerness
of delight was too extreme to pause for explanation
with Janet. On I pushed through the
groups of children, of whose sports I had been so
often a lazy lounging spectator. I sprung over
the gutter as if it had been the fatal Styx, and I a
ghost, which, eluding Pluto's authority, was making
its escape from Limbo lake.
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