“Excursions and alarums” of an exciting nature at once ensued, but neither these nor the rest of the lady’s life, though that was remarkable enough, concern us here. A little way farther down the street, as it nears the western wall of the Municipal Buildings, otherwise the Royal Exchange, there stood Mary King’s Close. I cannot, nor can anybody, it seems, tell who Mary King was. We have a picture of the close, or what remained of it in 1845; then the houses were vacant and roofless, the walls ruined, mere crumbling heaps of stones—weeds, wallflowers rankly flourishing in every crevice, for as yet the improver was only fitfully in the land. As far back as 1750 a fire had damaged the south or upper part of the close, which disappeared in the Royal Exchange. The place had been one of the spots peculiarly affected by the great plague of 1645; the houses were then shut up, and it was feared that if they were opened the pest would stalk forth again, but popular fancy soon peopled the close. If you lusted after a tremor of delicious horror you had but to step down its gloomy ways any night after dark and gaze through one of the windows. You saw a whole family dressed in the garb of a hundred years earlier and of undeniable ghost-like appearance quietly engaged in their ordinary avocations; then all of a sudden these vanished, and you spied a company “linking” it through the mazes of the dance, but not a mother’s son or daughter of them but wanted his or her head. In the close itself you might see in the air above you a raw head or an arm dripping blood. Such and other strange sights are preserved for us in _Satan’s Invisible World Displayed_ which was published in 1685 by Professor George Sinclair of Glasgow, afterwards minister of Eastwood. He tells us wondrous tales of the adventures in this close of Thomas Coltheart and his spouse. After their entry on the premises there appeared a human head with a grey floating beard suspended in mid air, to this was added the phantom of a child, and then an arm, naked from the elbow and totally unattached, which made desperate but unsuccessful efforts to shake Mrs. Coltheart by the hand. Mr. Coltheart, in the most orthodox fashion, begged from the ghosts an account of their wrongs, that he might speedily procure justice for them; but in defiance of all precedent they were obstinately silent, yet they grew in number—there came a dog and a cat, and a number of strange and grotesque beings, for whom natural history has no names. The flesh-and-blood inhabitants of the room were driven to kneel on the bed as being the only place left unoccupied. Finally, with a heart-moving groan, the appearances vanished, and Mr. Coltheart was permitted to enjoy his house in peace till the day of his death, but then he must himself begin to play spectre. He appeared to a friend at Tranent, ten miles off, and when the trembling friend demanded, “Are you dead? and if so, why come you?” the