warned him if he broke his word he would be guilty of a lie. The gardener, more irritated than amused, wished to have nothing whatever to do with him. Going into a room once where there was company, he was much struck with the appearance of a young lady there; he went up to her, laid his hand on her knees, “You are very beautiful,” he said. As a childish prank he thought he would make a ghost and frighten some other children. With a bolster and a sheet he succeeded only too well; he became frantic with terror, and fairly yelled the house down in his calls for help. A different man altogether was Sir Daniel Macnee, who was R.S.A. in 1876. He was born the same year as David Scott, and lived long after him. The famous portrait painter, kindly, polished, accomplished, was a man of the world, widely known and universally popular, except that his universal suavity of itself now and again excited enmity. “I dinna like Macnee a bit,” said a sour-grained old Scots dame; “he’s aye everybody’s freend!” The old lady might have found Sam Bough more to her taste. Though born in Carlisle he settled in Edinburgh in 1855, and belongs to the northern capital. In dress and much else he delighted to run tilt at conventions, and was rather an _enfant terrible_ at decorous functions. At some dinner or other he noted a superbly got up picture-dealer, whom he pretended to mistake for a waiter. “John—John, I say, John, bring me a pint of wine, and let it be of the choicest vintage.” His pranks at last provoked Professor Blackie, who was present, to declare roundly and audibly, “I am astonished that a man who can paint like an angel should come here and conduct himself like a fool.” He delighted in the Lothian and Fife coasts. The Bass he considered in some sort his own property, so he jocularly told its owner, Sir Hew Dalrymple, “You get £20 a year or so out of it; I make two or three hundred.” Bough was the very picture of a genial Bohemian, perhaps he was rather fitted to shine, a light of the Savage Club than of the northern capital, where, if tradition was followed, there was always something grim and fell even about the merry-making. One or two of his genial maxims are worth quoting. There had been some row about a disputed succession. “It’s an awful warning,” he philosophised, “to all who try to save money in this world. You had far better spend your tin on a little sound liquor, wherewith to comfort your perishable corps, than have such cursed rows about it after you have gone.” And again his golden rule of the _Ars Bibendi_, “I like as much as I can get honestly and carry decently,” on which profound maxim let us make an end of our chapter. CHAPTER NINE THE WOMEN OF EDINBURGH