Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
There were the bailie's wife, and the bailie's three daughters, and the bailie's grown-up son, and three or four stout, bushy eye-browed, canny, old Scotch fellows, that the bailie had got together to do honour to my uncle, and help to make merry. It was a glorious supper.
"If ye hae nae purse to fine, ye hae flesh to pine," replied the Bailie, "and I will look weel to ye getting your deserts the tae way or the tither." To the commands of Mr. Jarvie, therefore, Andrew was compelled to submit, only muttering between his teeth, "Ower mony maisters, ower mony maisters, as the paddock said to the harrow, when every tooth gae her a tig."
The Bailie, whom this reference regarded, and who had all this while shifted from one foot to another with great impatience, 'like a hen, as he afterwards said, 'upon a het girdle'; and chuckling, he might have added, like the said hen in all the glory of laying an egg, now pushed forward.
It was not, of course, my wish to protract the fray my adversary seemed equally disposed to sheathe his sword the Bailie, gasping for breath, might be considered as hors de combat, and our two sword-and-buckler men gave up their contest with as much indifference as they had entered into it.
I looked at the Bailie, who acknowledged, in a whisper, "that the gowk had some reason for singing, ance in the year." Meantime a staring half-clad wench or two came out of the inn and the neighbouring cottages, on hearing the sound of our horses' feet.
Upon Saturday, at noon, just as the Bailie was going along the Terrace to his house and congratulating himself that on that day at least he was free from all annoyance by the way, another character of Muirtown had started out through a very different part of the fair city. London John was as well known in Muirtown as the Bailie himself, and in his way was quite as imposing.
The noble was the leader and protector of the town. As to police, the burghers, each in his turn, provided men to keep watch and ward from curfew bell to cock-crow. Each ward in the town had its own elected Bailie. Each burgh had exclusive rights of trading in its area, and of taking toll on merchants coming within its Octroi.
A sturdier author wrote that he would sometimes have been glad to meet his assailant "where the muir-cock was bailie." We know how testily Wordsworth replied in defence to the gentlest comments by Lamb.
Provosts might come and go creatures of three years but this man remained in office for ever, and so towered above his brethren of the same kind, that the definite article was attached to his title, and to quote "the Bailie" without his name was the recognised form and an end to all controversy.
What, oh what had become of the pillar of commerce, the man who might have been a bailie had he sought municipal honours, the elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, the instructor of literary young men?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking