[Illustration: SUSANNAH, COUNTESS OF EGLINTON, From the Painting by Gavin Hamilton] Their mansion house, by the way, afterwards served as Fortune’s tavern, far the most fashionable of its kind in Edinburgh. The Countess has her connection with letters: Allan Ramsay dedicated his _Gentle Shepherd_ to her, William Hamilton of Bangour chanted her in melodious verse, and Dr. Johnson and she said some nice things to one another when he was in Scotland. She was a devoted Jacobite, had a portrait of Charles Edward so placed in her bedroom as to be the first thing she saw when she wakened in the morning. Her last place in Edinburgh was in Jack’s Land in the Canongate. We have ceased to think it remarkable, that noble ladies dwelt in those now grimy ways. She had a long innings of fashion and power, for it was not till 1780, at the ripe age of ninety-one, that she passed away. She kept her looks even in age. “What would you give to be as pretty as I?” she asked her eldest daughter, Lady Betty. “Not half so much as you would give to be as young as I,” was the pert rejoinder. Another high and mighty dame was Catharine, daughter of John, Earl of Dundonald, and wife of Alexander, sixth Earl of Galloway. She lived in the Horse Wynd in the Cowgate, and, it is averred, always went visiting in a coach and six. It is said—and you quite believe it—that whilst she was being handed into her coach the leaders were already pawing in front of the destined door. In youth her beauty, in age her pride and piety, were the talk of the town. Are they not commemorated in the _Holyrood Ridotto_? A more pleasing figure is that of Primrose Campbell of Mamore, widow of that crafty Lord Lovat whose head fell on Tower Hill in 1747. She dwelt at the top of Blackfriar’s Wynd, where Walter Chepman the old Edinburgh printer had lived 240 years before. She passed a pious, peaceable, and altogether beautiful widowhood; perhaps her happiest years, for old Simon Fraser had given her a bad time. She looked forward to the end with steady, untroubled eyes, got her graveclothes ready, and the turnpike stair washed. Was this latter, you wonder, so unusual a measure? She professed indifference as to her place of sepulchre “You may lay me beneath that hearthstane.” And so, in 1796, in her eighty-sixth year, she went to her rest. Some of those ladies were not too well off. Two of the house of Traquair lived close by St. Mary’s Wynd. The servant, Jenny, had been out marketing. “But, Jenny, what’s this in the bottom of the basket?” “Oo, mem, just a dozen o’ taties that Lucky, the green-wife, wad hae me to tak’; they wad eat sae fine wi’ the mutton.” “Na, na, Jenny, tak’ back the taties—we need nae provocatives in this house.”