visit from his courteous old friend of the West Bow. The Scots criminal, like all his countrymen, had abundant courage; he was ready to “dree his weird,” or, in the popular language of our day, “face the music” with a certain stoical philosophy, but he almost invariably did so in a pious and orthodox frame of mind. Nothing could show more strongly the depth and strength of the popular belief than the frequency with which both persecutor and criminal turned at the end with whole-hearted conviction to the creed of the people. There is nothing in Scotland of those jovial exits which highwaymen like Duval and Sixteen-String Jack made at Tyburn tree, unless we count M‘Pherson an exception. He was hanged at Banff in 1700. For the last time he played the tune called M‘Pherson’s Rant on his fiddle, and we know how excellently Burns has written his epitaph; but he was only a wild Hielandman, so the contemporary Lowlander would have observed. The West Bow runs off southward just where the Castle Hill joins the Lawnmarket. On the north side of the Lawnmarket a little way down there still stands Lady Stair’s Close and in it Lady Stair’s house, and about the same time, that is, the early years of the eighteenth century, there happened to Lady Stair, or Lady Primrose, as she then was, certain miraculous events which constitute the most romantic tradition of the Old Town. Scott has written a charming novelette, _My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror_, on the theme, and I can only present it here in the briefest possible fashion. Lord Primrose, the lady’s first husband, was, it would appear, mad, at any rate, he tried to kill his wife, in the which failing he left Auld Reekie and went abroad. As she wondered and speculated what had become of him, she heard a gossiping rumour of an Italian sorcerer possessed of strange power then in Edinburgh. He had a magic mirror wherein he could show what any absent person was doing at that precise moment. Lady Stair and her friend presently procured what we should call a séance. The magician dwelt in a dark recess of some obscure Canongate close, at least we must suppose so in order to get sufficient perspective, for all those localities in Edinburgh were so terribly near to one another. From Lady Stair’s Close to the Canongate is but a few minutes’ leisurely promenade. After certain preliminary rites the lady gazed in the magic mirror: it showed forth a bridal, and the bridegroom was her own husband; the service went on some way, and then it was interrupted by a person whom she recognised as her own brother. Presently the figures vanished, and the curtain fell. The lady took an exact note of the time and circumstances, and when her brother returned from abroad she eagerly questioned him. It was all true: the church was in Rotterdam, and her husband was about to commit the unromantic offence of bigamy with the daughter of a rich merchant when “the long arm of coincidence” led the brother to the church just in time.