The relation of the last resident king of Scots to his mercantile subjects in Edinburgh was generally a good-humoured one; but there was one occasion when serious strife stood between them, though for a short time only. Under some misapprehension about his intentions regarding the clergy, a mob beset his majesty for an hour or two in the place of judgment in the Tolbooth. He was, or affected to be, very wroth with the people of Edinburgh, and returning on Hogmanay day, a fortnight after the riot, he ordered that the ports and streets should be kept for his protection by certain Border chiefs on whom he could depend. A rumour arose that _Kinmont Willie_ and other border thieves were come to _spulyie_ the town, and immediately there was such a scene as no Edinburgh merchant then living could ever forget. The principal men took the goods out of their booths, and transported them to the strongest house in the town—possibly Macmoran’s—posting themselves and servants there also, all fully armed, in apprehension of an immediate attack. In like manner, groups of the craftsmen and commoner sort of people gathered into strong houses, with their best goods, and with arms in their hands to defend their property to the last extremity. An Edinburgh citizen, John Birrel, chronicles this affair, with the remark—‘Judge, gentle reader, gif this be play.’ After all, the guard of borderers did our merchants and craftsmen no harm; but when one reads of such an alarm, it becomes easy to understand how Macmoran and Gourlay had such strong houses for conducting their business, and how all the closes in the High Street should have had gates at top and bottom, as still appears in many cases by the remaining hooks for the hinges. When we pass on to the early part of the seventeenth century, we still find merchants of considerable importance in Edinburgh. They usually are either the descendants or the progenitors of good families. As an example of the former, we may take James Murray, of whose living locality in our city I can say nothing, but who, at his death in old age in 1649, was laid in the Greyfriars’ Churchyard. James was a younger son of Patrick Murray of Philiphaugh, and to each of his three sons, by Bethia Maule of the Panmure family, he left an estate. Perhaps I could in no way better describe him than by the quaint words of his epitaph in the Greyfriars: