when
you were once admitted within their precincts. They have pulled her
house down; for, indeed, betwixt building and burning, every ancient
monument of the Scottish capital is now likely to be utterly demolished.
I pause on the recollections of the place, however; and since nature has
denied a pencil when she placed a pen in my hand, I will endeavour to
make words answer the purpose of delineation.

Baliol's Lodging, so was the mansion named, reared its high stack of
chimneys, among which were seen a turret or two, and one of those
small projecting platforms called bartizans, above the mean and modern
buildings which line the south side of the Canongate, towards the lower
end of that street, and not distant from the Palace. A PORTE COCHERE,
having a wicket for foot passengers, was, upon due occasion, unfolded by
a lame old man, tall, grave, and thin, who tenanted a hovel beside the
gate, and acted as porter. To this office he had been promoted by my
friend's charitable feelings for an old soldier, and partly by an idea
that his head, which was a very fine one, bore some resemblance to that
of Garrick in the character of Lusignan. He was a man saturnine, silent,
and slow in his proceedings, and would never open the PORTE COCHERE to
a hackney coach, indicating the wicket with his finger as the proper
passage for all who came in that obscure vehicle, which was not
permitted to degrade with its ticketed presence the dignity of Baliol's
Lodging. I do not think this peculiarity would have met with his lady's
approbation, any more than the occasional partiality of Lusignan, or, as
mortals called him, Archie Macready, to a dram. But Mrs. Martha Bethune
Baliol, conscious that, in case of conviction, she could never have
prevailed upon herself to dethrone the King of Palestine from the stone
bench on which he sat for hours knitting his stocking, refused, by
accrediting the intelligence, even to put him upon his trial, well
judging that he would observe more wholesome caution if he conceived his
character unsuspected, than if he were detected, and suffered to pass
unpunished. For after all, she said, it would be cruel to dismiss an
old Highland soldier for a peccadillo so appropriate to his country and
profession.

The stately gate for carriages, or the humble accommodation for
foot-passengers, admitted into a narrow and short passage running
between two rows of lime-trees, whose green foliage during the spring
contrasted str