It is said, in the “Heart of Midlothian,” that “a phantom of former days,” in the shape of “an old worn-out Highlander, dressed in a cocked hat, bound with white tape instead of silver lace, and in coat, waistcoat and breeches, of a muddy-coloured red,” (the costume of _the Guard_,) “still creeps around the statue of Charles the Second, in the Parliament Square, as if the image of a Stuart were the last refuge for any memorial of our ancient manners.” This venerable spectre is neither more nor less than the goodly flesh and blood figure of John Kennedy, who served in the corps ever since the American war, and who is now employed by Mr. Rae, keeper of the Parliament House, to sweep the arcade, and to prevent little ragged urchins from disturbing by their noisy sports the weightier business of the law. John Kennedy was one of the band; and was well known to the heroes of the High School forty years ago. Like him, the greater part of his surviving brethren have changed into new shapes. One or two may be observed now and then, staggering about the outskirts of the town, or dozing away the last years of life upon the seats in the Meadow Walk and the King’s Park. Their old musty coats, in such instances, are dyed in some colour less military than red, and generally otherwise modernized by abscission of the skirts. A pair of their original spatterdashers still case their legs,—but which still less scarcely fend than formerly “——to keep Frae weet and weary plashes O’ dirt, thir days.” We once stumbled upon a veteran snugly bedded in a stall of about three feet square, crammed into the internal space of an outside stair in the West Bow. In this den he exercised the calling of a cobbler. Like all shoemakers, he was an earnest politician, and read the _Scotsman_ every week in the second month of its age, after it had made the tour of _the Bow_;—“being determined,” he said, “to _stick by the nation_!” We have also sometimes found occasion to recognise the nose of an old acquaintance, under the disguise of a circulator of bills, at the doors of certain haberdashers on the South Bridge. We have a peculiar veneration for a puff given forth from the paw of an _old Town-Guardsman_; and seldom find it in our heart to put such a document to a death of candle-ends.