has declared that the worst service you can do your criminal is to assign him an inexperienced counsel. One Scots convict, at least, agreed. He had been accused and thus defended and convicted. As he was being removed, he shook his fist in the face of his advocate: “Its a’ through you, you d—d ass.” The epithet was never forgotten. The unfortunate orator was known ever afterwards as the “d—d ass.” Sir George Deas was the last judge who talked anything like broad Scots on the bench. Once he and Inglis took different sides on a point of law which was being argued before them. Counsel urged that Inglis’s opinion was contrary to a previous decision of his own. “I did not mean,” said the President, “that the words should be taken in the sense in which you are now taking them.” “Ah,” said Lord Deas, “your lordship sails vera near the wind there.” This is quite in the early manner; Kames might have said it to Monboddo. CHAPTER TWO THE CHURCH There are many picturesque incidents in the history of the old Scots Church in Edinburgh; chief of them are the legends that cling round the memory of St. Margaret. Her husband, Malcolm Canmore, could not himself read, but he took up the pious missals in which his wife delighted and kissed them in a passion of homage and devotion. There is the dramatic account of her last days, when the news was brought her of the defeat and death of her husband and son at Alnwick, and she expired holding the black rood of Scotland in her hand, whilst the wild yells of Donald Bane’s kerns rent the air, as they pressed round the castle to destroy her and hers. Then follows the story of the removal of her body to Dunfermline in that miraculous mist in which modern criticism has seen nothing but an easterly haar. Then we have her son King David’s hunting in wild Drumsheugh forest on Holy-rood day, and the beast that nearly killed him, his miraculous preservation, and the legend of the foundation of Holyrood. In the dim centuries that slipped away there was much else of quaint and homely and amusing and interesting in mediæval church life in Edinburgh, but the monkish chroniclers never thought it worth the telling, and it has long vanished beyond recall. This one story is a gem of its kind. Scott, who never allowed such fruit to go ungathered, has made it well known. It is one of the incidents in the fight between the Douglases and the Hamiltons at Edinburgh on 30th April 1520, known to all time as _Cleanse the Causeway_, because the Hamiltons were swept from the streets. Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, was a supporter of Arran and the Hamiltons, who proposed to attack the Douglases and seize Angus, their leader. Angus sent his uncle, Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, whose “meek and thoughtful eye” Scott has commemorated in one of his best known lines, to remonstrate with his fellow-prelate. He found him sitting in episcopal state, and who was to