Haddington Abbey, the successor of earlier buildings, and now itself partly ruined, stands by the inconstant river, the nave, now the parish church, and the choir roofless, open to the sky. It is here within these grass-grown walls that “Jane Welsh Carlyle, spouse of Thomas Carlyle, Chelsea, London,” lies, as the remorseful epitaph says, “suddenly snatched away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out.” The spot where the Abbey stands, by the dishevelled and tumbledown quarter of Nungate, is the more abject now in that it still possesses old mansions that tell of a more prosperous past. Here, on the river-bank, neglected and forlorn like everything around, is the fine old screen of the Bowling Green, where no one has, for a century past, played bowls, unless indeed the wraiths of bygone Scottish notables haunt the spot o’ nights and play ghostly games, like the Kaatskill gnomes in _Rip Van Winkle_. It is from the other side of the river that the Abbey is best seen, its roofless central tower, the _Lucernia Laudoniae_, or “Lamp of Lothian,” still showing those triple lancets in every face which, according to the legend, obtained for it that title. To obtain this view, the Abbey bridge is crossed, which even now vividly illustrates on its wall the ready way the old burgh had with malefactors. From it projects a great hook, rusty for long want of usage, from which were hanged the reivers, the horse-thieves, and casual evildoers, with jurisdiction of the most summary kind. No Calcraft science with it either, with neck broken in decent fashion, but just a hauling up of the rope and a tying of it to some handy stanchion, and the unhappy malefactor left to throttle by slow degrees. No other such picturesque hanging-place as this, but what is scenery to a criminal about to be hanged like a tom-cat caught killing chickens. [Picture: Haddington Abbey, from Nungate] The crest, arms, trade-mark or badge of Haddington is a goat. There is no doubt about that, for Billy (or is it a Nanny?) has his (or her) effigy on many of the old buildings. Only by comparison and by slow degrees is it that the stranger arrives at the conclusion that it is a goat, for the drawing of many of these representations leaves much to be desired. Some resemble an elephant, others a horse, others yet what “the mind’s eye, Horatio” might conceive a Boojum to be like; but in the open space where High Street and Market Street join, the modern Market Cross, surmounted by a more carefully executed carving, determines the species.