instance the old adage of Aristotle, simile gaudet simili, was exemplified to the letter; and the union confirmed in each a mind which, originally impatient of authority, fretted itself against the frame of society, simply because that frame was the result of order.  They were never happy except when they went up to the palisades, struck upon them with their lath-blades, and when some orderly indweller looked over atop, ran away laughing.  No doubt they had strong passions to gratify too; but, as is usual with this peculiar race of beings, the gratification was the keener the more it owed to a rebellion against decorum.  If they ever differed, it was only in their rivalry of success; or when they did not go a spree-hunting together, they recounted their exploits at their nightly meetings, and then the result was an increase of moral inflammation.

Sometimes, for a change, they would take strolls into the country, where they could extract as tribute the admiration or wrath of clodhoppers without being troubled with any fears of the police; not that on any of these occasions they perpetrated any great infringements on the law, for, like the rest of their kind, if they could make themselves objects of observation, they were regardless whether their bizarreries were paid with admiration or only anger or fear, though, if they could produce by any means a causeless panic, the very height of their ambition was attained.  In regard to this last effect of their escapades, they were, in the instance I am about to record, more than satisfied.  They had gone, on a fine, clear, winter day, along the coast of the Firth of Forth towards Cramond; and, to diversify their amusements, they took with them a gun, which was carried by S——­th, with the intention of having a shot at any wild bird or barn-door fowl that might come conveniently within his range.  Of this kind of game they had fewer chances, and the stroll would doubtless have appeared a very monotonous affair to a person fond of rational conversation.  Nor was there much even to themselves of diversification till they got into a small change-house at Davidson’s Mains, where, with a rampant authority, they contrived to get served up to them a kind of dinner, intending to make up for the want of better edibles by potations of whisky toddy.

If facts, as Quinctilian says, are the bones of conversation, opinions are certainly its sinews; and we might add, that whisky toddy is its nervous fluid.  These youths, though unwilling to acquire solid information, could wrangle even to quarrelling; but such were their affinities, that they adhered again in a short time, and were as firm friends as ever.  They had raised a subject—­no other than the question whether highwaymen are necessarily or generally possessed of true courage.  Very absurd, no doubt, but as good for a wrangle as any other that can be divided into affirmative and negative by the refracting medium of feeling or prejudice.  S——­th declared them all to be cowards.