The bill was paid by S——­k, who happened to have money, and who gave it on the implied condition of a similar one for all on another occasion.  They went, or, as the phrase is often, sallied forth.  The night had now come down with her black shadows.  There was no moon.  She was dispensing her favours among savages in another hemisphere, who, savages though they were, might have their devotions to their strange gods, resident with her up yonder, where no robbery is, save that of light from the pure fountain of heat and life.  Yes, the darkness was auspicious to folly, as it often is to vice; and there was quietness too—­no winds abroad to speak voices through rustling leaves, to terrify the criminal from his wild rebellion against the peace of nature.  No night could have suited them better.  Yes, all was favourable but God; and Him these wild youths had offended, as disobedient sons of poor parents, who had educated them well—­as rebellious citizens among a society which would have hailed them as ornaments—­as despisers of God’s temple, where grace was held out to them and spurned.

They were now upon the low road leading parallel to the beach, and towards the end of Inverleith Row.  Nor had the devil left them with the deserted toddy-bowl.  There was still pride for S——­th, and for the others the rankling sense of inferiority in talent and of injury from scorching irony.  Nor had they proceeded two miles, till the fatal opportunity loomed in the dark, in the form of a figure coming up from Leith or Edinburgh.

  Now, S——­th;
  Now, the cowardly Cartouche;
  Now, the poltroon Rob Roy;
  Now, the braggart Wallace!

But S——­th did not need the taunts, nor, though many a patriotic cause wanted such a youth, was he left for other work, that night of devil-worship.  The figure approached.  Alas! the work so easy.  S——­th was right; how easy and cowardly, where the stranger was, in the confidence of his own heart, unprepared, unweaponed!  Yet those who urged him on leapt a dyke.

“Stand and deliver!” said S——­th, with a handkerchief over his face.

“God help me!” cried the man, in a fit of newborn fear.  “I’m a father, have wife and bairns; but I canna spare my life to a highwayman.  Here, here, here.”

And fumbling nervously in his pocket, and shaking all over, not at all like the old object of similitude, but rather like a branch of a tree driven by the wind, he thrust something into S——­th’s hand, and rushing past him, was off on the road homewards.  Nor was it a quick walk under fear, but a run, as if he thought he was or would be pursued for his life, or brought down by the long range of the gun he had seen in the hands of the robber.

Yes, it was easily done, and it was done; but how to be undone at a time when the craving maw of the noose dangled from the post, in obedience to the Procrustes of the time!

And S——­th felt it was done.  His hand still held what the man had pushed into it, but by-and-by it was as fire.  His brain reeled; he staggered, and would have fallen, but for S——­k, who, leaping the dyke, came behind him.