and staff, showed his purpose of
accompanying her, though his tongue failed distinctly to announce it.

* A kind of worsted gloves, used by the lower orders.

"Father," said Jeanie, replying rather to his action than his words, "ye
had better not."

"In the strength of my God," answered Deans, assuming firmness, "I will
go forth."

And, taking his daughter's arm under his, he began to walk from the door
with a step so hasty, that she was almost unable to keep up with him. A
trifling circumstance, but which marked the perturbed state of his mind,
checked his course.

"Your bonnet, father?" said Jeanie, who observed he had come out with his
grey hairs uncovered. He turned back with a slight blush on his cheek,
being ashamed to have been detected in an omission which indicated so
much mental confusion, assumed his large blue Scottish bonnet, and with a
step slower, but more composed, as if the circumstance, had obliged him
to summon up his resolution, and collect his scattered ideas, again
placed his daughter's arm under his, and resumed the way to Edinburgh.

The courts of justice were then, and are still, held in what is called
the Parliament Close, or, according to modern phrase, Parliament Square,
and occupied the buildings intended for the accommodation of the Scottish
Estates. This edifice, though in an imperfect and corrupted style of
architecture, had then a grave, decent, and, as it were, a judicial
aspect, which was at least entitled to respect from its antiquity. For
which venerable front, I observed, on my last occasional visit to the
metropolis, that modern taste had substituted, at great apparent expense,
a pile so utterly inconsistent with every monument of antiquity around,
and in itself so clumsy at the same time and fantastic, that it may be
likened to the decorations of Tom Errand the porter, in the _Trip to the
Jubilee,_ when he appears bedizened with the tawdry finery of Beau
Clincher. _Sed transeat cum caeteris erroribus._

The small quadrangle, or Close, if we may presume still to give it that
appropriate, though antiquated title, which at Lichfield, Salisbury, and
elsewhere, is properly applied to designate the enclosure adjacent to a
cathedral, already evinced tokens of the fatal scene which was that day
to be acted. The soldiers of the City Guard were on their posts, now
enduring, and now rudely repelling with the butts of their muskets, the
motley crew who thrust each other forward, to ca