midnight
Sleek magistrates and councillors in unaccustomed black suits and silver-buckled shoes , the provost ermined at their head , showed the way to the more actual , the more dignified embodiment of stern Scots law . At least a score of wigs were there from the Parliament House of Edinburgh , a score of dusty gowns , accustomed to sweep the lobbies of the Courts of Session , gathered the sand of the burgh street , and in their midst walked the representatives of that old feudal law at long-last ostensibly abandoned , and of the common law of the land . Argyll was in a demure equivalent for some Court costume , with a dark velvet coat , a ribbon of the Thistle upon his shoulder , a sword upon his haunch , and for all his sixty-six years he carried himself less like the lawyer made at Utrecht -- like Justice-General and Extraordinary Lord of Session -- than like the old soldier who had served with Marlborough and took the field for the House of Hanover in 1715 . My Lords Elchies and Kilkerran walked on either side of him -- Kilkerran with the lack-lustre eye of the passionate mathematician , the studious moralist devoted to midnight oil , a ruddy , tall , sturdy man , well filling the crimson and white silk gown ; Elchies , a shrivelled atomy with a hirpling walk , leaning heavily upon a rattan , both with the sinister black tri-corne hats in their hands , and flanked by a company of musketeers . A great band of children lent the ludicrous element again to the company by following close upon its heels , chanting a doggerel song to the tune of the trumpets ; the populace stood at the close-mouths or leaned over their windows looking at the spectacle , wondering at the pomp given to the punishment of a Stewart who a few years ago would have been sent to the gallows by his Grace with no more formality than might have attended the sentence of a kipper salmon-poacher to whipping at the hands of Long Davie the dempster . His Grace was entertaining the Lords , the Counsel -LRB- all but the convict 's lawyers -- a lot of disaffected Jacobites , who took their food by themselves at the inn , and brusquely refused his Grace 's hospitality -RRB- , the magistracy , and some county friends , to a late dinner at the castle that night , and an hour after saw them round the ducal board . If Count Victor was astonished at the squalid condition of things in the castle of the poor Baron of Doom , he would have been surprised to find here , within an hour or two 's walk of it , so imposing and luxuriant a domesticity .