The first Earl of Haddington lived, as King James’s nickname tells, in the Cowgate, and the house stood there till about 1829. Tam o’ the Cowgate was a learned judge, and, according to the ideas of that time, a man of such enormous wealth that it was popularly thought he had found the philosopher’s stone. One evening, when he was sitting with friend and flask, tired after a hard day, clad in an easy undress of nightgown, cap, and slippers, he heard a sudden uproar in the street. The students of the newly founded University and the boys of the High School were indulging in a “bicker”; and the University was winning. The Earl of Haddington had been a High School boy, and, as an old hunter becomes restive in his cart when he hears the distant chase, so the learned Privy Councillor leapt up, rushed forth, rallied his old school, and, in his nightgown, cap, and slippers, led the charge and pursued the routed students through the town and out at the West Port, locked the city gate on them, and then returned home to his unfinished flask and his waiting crony. Another friend of King James was the Earl of Mar, who had been his fellow-pupil with George Buchanan. Him the King dubbed a “Jock o’ Sklates”; and when a marriage between the two powerful families of Mar and Haddington was contemplated, King James cried out, “The Lord haud grup o’ me! If Tam o’ the Cowgate’s son marry Jock o’ Sklates’s daughter, what’s to come o’ _me_?” George Buchanan, the humanist and reformer, was a citizen of Edinburgh for many years. He was not one of those whom his royal pupil took with him across the Border. It was in a first-floor room in Kennedy’s Close,--a close no longer existing,--that George Buchanan died, in his seventy-sixth year. When he was dying, he was visited by Andrew Melville and his nephew, and was discovered giving a first reading lesson to a small boy--“a, b, ab; b, a, ba.” When his visitors expressed mild wonder at his occupation, the dying scholar, perhaps with some gleam of remembrance of his own boyhood in Dumbartonshire, replied, “Better this than stealin’ nowts.” Andrew Melville had brought with him some of the proof sheets of Buchanan’s Latin history, and--the small boy having probably slipped willingly off to play--these were discussed. They contained some allusions to his former pupil, the absent King James, now so alienated from the doctrines of Buchanan; and Andrew Melville hinted gently that these might be indiscreet, and productive of trouble. “Are they _true_?” demanded the historian. To Melville’s mind they had this quality. “Then I’ll bide his dreid and a’ his kin’s!”