Jean, sister-in-law to Archibald Constable the publisher, had been educated in France and hesitated to admit that she had forgotten the language, and would translate coals “collier” and table napkin “table napkune,” to the amazement and amusement of her hearers. Her ideas towards the close got a little mixed. “If I should be spared to be taken away,” she remarked, “I hope my nephew will get the doctor to open my head and see if anything can be done for my hearing.” This is a masterpiece of its kind, and perhaps too good to be perfectly true. She played well; “gars the instrument speak,” it was said. There was one touch of romance in her life. A French admirer had given her a box of bonbons, wherein she found “a puzzle ring of gold, divided yet united,” and with their joint initials. She never saw or heard from her lover, yet she called for it many times in her last illness. It was a better way of showing her constancy than that taken by Lady Betty Charteris, of the Wemyss family. Disappointed in love, she took to her bed, where she lay for twenty-six years, to the time of her death, in fact. This was in St. John Street in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The stage was without much influence in Edinburgh save on rare occasions. One of them was when Sarah Siddons was in Edinburgh in 1784. Her first appearance was on the 22nd May of that year, when she scored a success as Belvedere in _Venice Preserved_. The audience listened in profound silence, and the lady, used to more enthusiasm, got a little nervous, till a canny citizen was moved audibly to admit, “That’s no bad.” A roar of applause followed that almost literally brought down the galleries. She played Lady Randolph in _Douglas_ twice; “there was not a dry eye in the whole house,” observed the contemporary _Courant_. Shakespeare was not acted during her visit; the folk of the time were daring enough to consider him just so-so after Home! Everybody was mad to hear her. At any rate, the General Assembly of the Church was deserted until its meetings were arranged not to clash with her appearance. There were applications for 2550 places where there were only 630 of that description on hand. The gallery doors were guarded by detachments of soldiers with drawn bayonets, which they are said to have used to some purpose on an all too insistent crowd. Her tragedy manner was more than skin deep, she could never shake it off; she talked in blank verse. Scott used to tell how, during a dinner at Ashestiel, she made an attendant shake with— “You’ve brought me water, boy—I asked for beer.”