cranium! A wild glance upward, and behold, his wig ascending heaven-ward without any visible means of support! The laugh, so to speak, was now on the cat’s side. “The perpetrators did afterwards get many injunctions from their parents never again to fish over the window, with such a bait, for honest men’s wigs”; and the incident was pardoned by Lord Coalstoun,--if not by the kitten. In Advocates’ Close there existed in the seventeenth century, in an upper storey of the house of John Scougall the artist, a picture-gallery,--the first public exhibition of works of art, it is said, in Scotland; and preceding any such attempt of the same kind, either in England or France.[40] On the south side of the street the Old Assembly Close and Bell’s Wynd are connected with another phase of polite society in bygone Edinburgh. It was in the Old Assembly Close that those rigid and awe-inspiring functions were held, presided over by some lady of rank and mistress of the unwritten laws of etiquette, of which Goldsmith and Captain Topham have both left such graphic accounts, and which form the theme of one of the chapters in Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_. Then the Assembly Close received the fair: Order and elegance presided there, Each gay Right Honourable had her place, To walk a minuet with becoming grace. No racing to the dance with rival hurry-- Such was thy sway, O famed Miss Nicky Murray![41] Miss Nicky Murray was indeed famed. She was a sister of the Earl of Mansfield, and lived in Bailie Fyfe’s Close, and there “finished” young lady cousins from the country, and introduced them into society. She presided over the Assemblies, seated on a raised throne, and a wave of her fan silenced the musicians. “It is said that Miss Murray,” writes Mr. Robert Chambers, “on hearing a young lady’s name pronounced for the first time, would say: ‘Miss ----, of what?’ If no territorial addition could be made, she manifestly cooled.” After 1758 the Assemblies were held in Bell’s Wynd, until the building of the New Town, and in 1824 the Assembly rooms, where Miss Nicky Murray had ruled, were burnt down.