What pleases me more in this scenery is that it is so perfectly characteristic of the country, so purely Scottish . . . No man in Edinburgh can for a moment forget that he is in Scotland.” It is almost startling to look up from the grime of the Canongate to the solitary nooks of Arthur’s Seat, though the sea of houses spreads miles around. Whatever scenic effects remain, the historical effects of the landscape are vanished. With what various emotions the crowd from every point of vantage must have watched Dundee’s progress along the Lang Gate to his interview with the Duke of Gordon on the Castle rock! And the town was not much changed when, rather more than half a century afterwards, the citizens, some of them the same, watched, after the affair at Coltbridge, the dragoons gallop along the same north ridge in headlong flight, a sight which promptly disposed the townsfolk’s minds in the direction of surrender. One gloomy tragedy of the year 1717 affords a curious illustration of this command of prospect. A road called Gabriel’s Road once ran from the little hamlet of Silvermills on the Water of Leith southward to where the Register House now stands. Formerly you crossed the dam which bounded the east end of the Nor’ Loch, and by the port at the bottom of Halkerston’s Wynd you entered old Edinburgh just as you might enter it now by the North Bridge, though at a very different level. To-day Gabriel’s Road still appears in the street directory, but it is practically a short flight of steps and a back way to a collection of houses. In the year mentioned a certain Robert Irvine, a probationer of the church, on or near this road, cruelly murdered his two pupils, little boys, and sons of Mr. Gordon of Ellom, whose only offence was some childish gossip about their preceptor. The instrument was a penknife, and the second boy fled shrieking when he saw the fate of his brother, but was pursued and killed by Irvine, whom you might charitably suppose to be at least partially insane were not deeds of ferocious violence too common in old Scots life. The point of the story for us is that the tragedy was clearly seen by a great number from the Old Town, though they were powerless to prevent. The culprit was forthwith seized, and as he was taken red-handed, was executed two days after by the authorities of Broughton, within whose territory the crime had occurred. His hands were previously hacked off with the knife, the instrument of his crime. The reverend sinner made a specially edifying end, not unnaturally a mark of men of his cloth. In 1570, John Kelloe, minister of Spott, near Dunbar, had, for any or no reason, murdered his wife. So well had he managed the affair that no one suspected him, but after six weeks his conscience forced him to make a clean breast of the matter. He was strangled and burned at the Gallow Lee, between Edinburgh and Leith. His behaviour at the end was all that could be desired. It strikes you as overdone, but