from the lofty houses into the street, “_Gardy loo_” was the conventional word of warning, uttered not seldom _after_ and not _before_ the event. Whether it was from the French “_Gare à l’eau_” may or may not be true. The delightful Mrs. Winifred Jenkins aptly translates it as: “May the Lord have mercy on your souls.” Until imprisonment for debt was abolished the precincts of Holyrood were inhabited by fugitive debtors, for there these had the privilege of sanctuary. They were called Abbey lairds, and many were the stories told of the dodges to get them out of the bounds or to remain after Sunday was finished, for that was a free day for them. Two anecdotes may be quoted. On a certain Sunday in July 1709, Patrick Haliburton, one of those Abbey lairds, was induced to visit a creditor, by whom he was received with the utmost geniality. The bottle was produced and Patrick quaffed to his heart’s content; as he staggered from the door _after_ midnight, a messenger seized him under a Writ of Caption and haled him off to prison. In 1724 Mrs. Dilkes, a debtor, had an invitation to a tavern within the verge, but to enter it she had to go a few paces beyond the Girth Cross. The moment she was outside she was nabbed; but this was too much for the women of the place, who rose in their might and rescued her. The wit of old Edinburgh was satirical, bitter, scornful, and the practical jokes not in the best of taste. The Union, we know, was intensely unpopular, nowhere more than in the Canongate. “London and death gar thee look dool,” sings Allan Ramsay. Holyrood was at an end, save for the election of representative Peers. At the first after the Union it was noted that all elected were loyal to the English government, “a plain evidence of the country’s slavery to the English Court.” A fruit-woman paraded the courts of the palace bawling most lustily, “Who would buy good pears, old pears, new pears, fresh pears—rotten pears, sixteen of them for a plack.” Remember that pears is pronounced “peers” in Scots and the point of the joke is obvious. In the suburb of the Pleasance a tailor called Hunter had erected a large house which folk named Hunter’s Folly, or the Castle of Clouts. Gillespie, the founder of Gillespie’s Hospital, was a snuff merchant; when he started a carriage the incorrigible Harry Erskine suggested as a motto: “Wha wad hae thocht it That noses had bocht it?”