I must now desert the groves of the Academy of James VI. to say a word on a lesser school and its schoolmasters. Here we have the memorable and illustrative story of the great barring out of September 1595 at the old High School. The scholars had gone on the 15th of that month to ask the Council for the week’s holiday of privilege as was usual. It was curtly refused, whereupon some “gentlemen’s bairns” collected firearms and swords, and in dead of night seized the schoolhouse, which they fortified in some sort. Their Rector, Master Pollock, was refused admittance next morning, and complained to the magistrates. Bailie John Macmorran came to the spot with a posse of officers, but William Sinclair, son of the Chancellor of Caithness, took his stand at a window and threatened to pistol the first who approached. Bailie Macmorran was a big man in his day—his house, now restored as University Hall, still rises stately and impressive in Riddle’s Close, on the south side of the Lawnmarket—and he was not to be put down by a schoolboy; he ordered his satellites to crash in the door with the beam they were bringing forward. It is not hard to reconstitute the scene: the bailie, full of civic importance and wrath, the angry boy at the window, the pride of youth and blood in his set, determined face. Presently the pistol shot rang out, and Macmorran fell dead on the pavement with a bullet through his brain. The whole town rushed to the spot, seized the frightened boys and thrust them into the Tolbooth, but finally they were liberated without hurt, after, it would seem, some form of a trial. There are many quaint details as to the scholars. They used to go to the fields in the summer to cut rushes or bent for the floor of the school, but, you see, fighting was the work or the game of nearly every male in Scotland, and even the children must needs have their share. On these expeditions the boys fell to slashing one another with their hooks, and they were stopped. The winter of 1716 was distinguished by furious riots, though not of the same deadly nature. The pupils demolished every window of the school and of the adjacent parish church of Lady Yester, also the wall which fenced the playground. I will not gather records of the various Rectors, not even of Dr. Alexander Adam, the most famous of them all. You can see to-day his portrait by Raeburn, and one of Raeburn’s best in the Gallery on the Mound, and think of his striking utterance in the last hours of his life, “Boys, it is growing dark, you may go home.” In his prime he had a profound conviction of his own qualities and those of his school. “Come away, sir,”—thus he would address a new scholar,—“you will see more here in an hour than you will in any other school in Europe.” He had a long series of eminent pupils, among them Scott, Horner, and Jeffrey, and the manner in which they have spoken of him justifies his words and his reputation.