Practical joking of the most pronounced description was much in favour in old Edinburgh. One Dempster, a jeweller in the Parliament Close, after a bout of hard drinking, was minded to cut his throat. A friend, described by Kay as “a gentleman of very convivial habits,” remarked in jest that he would save him the trouble, and proceeded to stick a knife into him. It was at once seen that the joke—and the knife—if anything, had been pushed too far, and John Bennet, surgeon, was summoned in desperate haste; his treatment was so satisfactory that the wound was cured and the matter hushed up. The delighted Hamilton, relieved from dismal visions of the Tolbooth and worse, “presented Mr. Bennet with an elegant chariot,” and from this time he was a made man. _His_ ideas of humour were also a little peculiar. In payment of a bet he gave a dinner at Leith at which, as usual, everybody drank a great deal too much. They were to finish up the evening at the theatre, and there they were driven in mourning coaches at a funereal pace. All this you may consider mere tomfoolery, mad pranks of ridiculous schoolboys, but Bennet was a grave and reputable citizen; he was President of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1803, and died in 1805, and in the stories that I tell of him and others you have for good or ill eighteenth-century Edinburgh. He was a very thin man. He once asked a tailor if he could measure him for a suit of small clothes? “Oh,” said the man of shears, “hold up your stick, it will serve the purpose well enough.” You can only conjecture whether the order was in fact given, for there the chronicle stops short. There are certain “large and comfortable words” in the _Rhyming Epistle to a Tailor_ that would have served excellent well for a reply. Bennet had not the wit of Burns, and _his_ reply is not preserved. You believe, however, it did not lack strength. [Illustration: DR. ALEXANDER WOOD, From an Engraving after Ailison] One of the best known surgeons of old Edinburgh was Alexander Wood (1725-1807), whose name still survives in a verse of Byron’s. Once he “would a-wooing go,” and was asked by his proposed father-in-law as to his means. He drew out his lancet case: “We have nothing but this,” he said frankly. He got the lady, however. Sir James Stirling, the Provost, was unpopular on account of his opposition to a scheme for the reform of the Royal boroughs of Scotland. He was so like Wood that the one was not seldom mistaken for the other, and a tragedy of errors was well-nigh acted. An angry mob, under the mistaken impression that they had their Lord Provost, were dragging Wood to the edge of the North Bridge with the loudly expressed intention of throwing him over, but when he yelled above the din, “I’m lang Sandy Wood; tak’ me to a lamp and ye’ll see,” the crowd dissolved in shouts of laughter.