A little coarse, perhaps, but it was “the tune o’ the time.” “Wild as colt untamed,” no doubt; and she got herself into some more or less laughable scrapes; but what would not be pardoned to a beautiful Duchess? Her pranks were nothing to those of Lady Maxwell of Monreith’s daughters. They lived in Hyndford’s Close, just above the Netherbow. One of them, a future Duchess of Gordon, too, chased, captured, and bestrode a lusty sow, which roamed the streets at will, whilst her sister, afterwards Lady Wallace, thumped it behind with a stick. In the mid-eighteenth century, you perceive, swine were free of the High Street of Edinburgh. In after years Lady Wallace had, like other Edinburgh ladies, a sharp tongue. The son of Kincaid, the King’s printer, was a well-dressed dandy—“a great macaroni,” as the current phrase went. From his father’s lucrative patent, he was nicknamed “young Bibles.” “Who is that extraordinary-looking young man?” asked some one at a ball. “Only young Bibles,” quoth Lady Wallace, “bound in calf and gilt, but not lettered.” Not that she had always the best of the argument. Once she complained to David Hume that when people asked her age she did not know what to say. “Tell them you have not yet come to the years of discretion,” said the amiable philosopher. It was quite in his manner. He talked to Lady Anne Lindsay (afterwards Barnard) as if they were contemporaries. She looked surprised. “Have not you and I grown up together; you have grown tall, and I have grown broad.” Lady Anne Dick of Corstorphine, granddaughter of “Bluidy” Mackenzie, was another wild romp. She loved to roam about the town at night in man’s dress. Every dark close held the possibility of an exciting adventure. Once she was caught by the heels, and passed the night in the guard-house which, as Scott tells us, “like a huge snail stretched along the High Street near the Tron Kirk for many a long day.” She wrote society verses, light or otherwise. She fancied herself or pretended to be in love with Sir Peter Murray—at least he was a favourite subject for her muse. Your Edinburgh fine lady could be high and mighty when she chose, witness Susanna Countess of Eglinton, wife of Alexander the ninth Earl, and a Kennedy of the house of Colzean. When she was a girl, a stray hawk alighted on her shoulder as she walked in the garden at Colzean; the Eglinton crest or name was on its bells, and she was entitled to hail the omen as significant. Perhaps the prophecy helped to bring its own fulfilment: at least she refused Sir John Clerk of Eldin for my Lord, though he was much her senior. “Susanna and the elder,” said the wits of the time. She was six feet in height, very handsome and very stately, and she had seven daughters like unto herself. One of the great sights of old Edinburgh were the eight gilded sedan chairs that conveyed those ladies, moving in stately procession from the old Post Office Close to the Assembly Rooms.