They were coming, as the increased hum and cluster of the bystanders told clearly enough--an extraordinary procession of its kind. Without a note of music, without a tint of color, with a tramp which was not the steady tramp of trained footsteps, but only the sound of a slowly advancing crowd, to which immense excitement gave a kind of solemnity--a long line of men in their common dress, unornamented, unattended, keeping a mysterious silence, and carrying a few flags, black, and with ominous devices, which only the strain of a great climax of national feeling could have suffered to pass without that ridicule which is more fatal than state prosecutions. Nobody laughed, so far as we are aware, at the skulls and cross-bones of this voiceless procession; and the tramp of that multitude of men, timed and cheered by no music, broken by no shouts, lightened by no gleam of weapons, or glitter of emblems, or variety of color, and only accompanied by the agitated hum of the bystanders, had a very remarkable and somewhat “gruesome” impressiveness. The people who were looking on grew silent gradually, and held their breath as the long train went slowly past. It might not be a formidable band. _Punch_--if _Punch_ had been in those days--might very likely have found a comfortable amount of laughter in the grim looks of the processionists, who were not likely to do much in justification of their deadly-looking flags. But the occasion was a remarkable occasion in the national history; the excitement was such--so general and overpowering--as no subsequent agitation has been able to equal. The real force of popular emotion in it covered even its own mock-heroics, which is no small thing to say; and there was something solemn in the unanimity of so many sober persons, who were not under the immediate sway and leadership of any demagogue, nor could be supposed to look for personal advantages, and whose extreme fervor and excitement at the same time were not revolutionary, but simply political. The “Bill,” on which the popular hope had fixed itself, had just met with one of its failures, and this was the exaggerated, yet expressive way in which the Edinburgh crowd demonstrated the popular sentiment of the day. These things can not be judged in cold blood; at that time everybody was excited. Cosmo Livingstone, white with boyish fervor, watched and counted them as they passed, with irresistible exclamations--“twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred!” the boy cried aloud with triumph, as score after score went past; and the women on the lower steps of the stair began to share his calculations and exult in them. The very children beneath, who were looking on with restless and excited curiosity, knew something about the “Bill,” which day by day, as the coach from the south, with the London mails, came in, they had been sent to learn tidings of; and the bookseller in the little shop could not restrain himself.