Immediately after the murder, he went and informed some of his accomplices, and took no pains to evade apprehension. He was tried and found guilty upon his own confession, and, after being executed in the Grassmarket, was hung in chains upon the Gallowlee.[35] A cairn of stones was erected upon the spot where the murder took place, in token of the people’s abhorrence and reprobation of the deed. It was removed several years since, when the Duke’s Walk was widened and levelled by Lord Adam Gordon. ST. ANTHONY’S CHAPEL, among the ruins of which Robertson found means to elude the pursuit of Sharpitlaw, is an interesting relic of antiquity, situated on a level space about half-way up the north-west side of the mountain called Arthur’s Seat. It lies in a westerly direction from Muschat’s Cairn, at about the distance of a furlong; and the Hunter’s Bog, also mentioned in this Tale, occupies a valley which surrounds all that side of the hill. The chapel was originally a place of worship, annexed to a hermitage at the distance of a few yards, and both were subservient to a monastery of the same name, which anciently flourished on the site of St. Anthony’s Street in Leith. In the times of Maitland and Arnot the ruin was almost entire; but now there only remain a broken wall and a few fragments of what has once been building, but which are now scarcely to be distinguished from the surrounding grey rocks;—so entirely has art in this case relapsed into its primitive nature, and lost all the characteristics of human handiwork. The slightest possible traces of a hermitage are also to be observed, plastered against the side of a hollow rock; and, further down the hill, there springs from the foot of a precipice the celebrated St. Anthony’s Well. Queen Mary is said to have visited all these scenes; and, somehow or other, her name is always associated with them by those who are accustomed to visit, on a Sunday afternoon, their hallowed precincts. They are also rendered sacred in song, by their introduction into one of the most beautiful, most plaintive, and most poetical of all Scotland’s ancient melodies: “I leant my back unto an aik, I thought it was a trusty tree: But first it bowed and syne it brak, Sae my true love’s forsaken me. “Oh! Arthur’s Seat shall be my bed, The sheets shall ne’er be pressed by me: St. Anton’s well shall be my drink, Sin’ my true love’s forsaken me,” etc. The situation is remarkably well adapted for a hermitage, though in the immediate neighbourhood of a populous capital. The scene around is as wild as a Highland desert, and gives an air of seclusion and peacefulness as complete. If the distant din of the city at all could reach the eremite’s ears, it would appear as insignificant as the murmur of the waves around the base of the isolated rock, and would be as unheeded. FOOTNOTES: