fairway left along the High Street with an open space on either
side of the church, but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of
the _lands_, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town.

There is a silly story of a subterranean passage between the Castle and
Holyrood, and a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its
windings. He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey;
the curious footed it after him down the street, following his descent
by the sound of the chanter from below; until all of a sudden, about the
level of St. Giles's, the music came abruptly to an end, and the people
in the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he was choked
with gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the Evil
One, remains a point of doubt; but the piper has never again been seen
or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the
land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may
take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a
strange moment for the cabmen on the stance beside St. Giles's, when
they hear the drone of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the
earth below their horses' feet.

But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a solid bulk of
masonry has been likewise spirited into the air. Here, for example, is
the shape of a heart let into the causeway. This was the site of the
Tolbooth, the Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and name-father
to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust; there is no more
_squalor carceris_ for merry debtors, no more cage for the old,
acknowledged prison-breaker; but the sun and the wind play freely over
the foundations of the jail. Nor is this the only memorial that the
pavement keeps of former days. The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh
lay behind St. Giles's Church, running downhill to the Cowgate and
covering the site of the present Parliament House. It has disappeared as
utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths; and for those ignorant of its
history, I know only one token that remains. In the Parliament Close,
trodden daily underfoot by advocates, two letters and a date mark the
resting-place of the man who made Scotland over again in his own image,
the indefatigable, undissuadable John Knox. He sleeps within call of the
church that so often echoed to his preaching.

Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and garlanded Charles Second, made
of lead, be