Tennent immediately began to build, and reared his hotel on the site of the kirkyard; grubbing up and destroying without scruple the gravestones of the old burgesses of two hundred years earlier. By December 1755 he had completed the building and removed from the “White Hart”: advertising in the _Edinburgh Courant_ of December 18th that his new house was a “convenient and handsome new inn,” built by himself at the request of the magistrates of Glasgow. He took the opportunity of acquainting “all Ladies and Gentlemen” that he had “36 Fire Rooms now fit to receive lodgers. The Bed-chambers are all separate, none of them entering through another, and are so contrived that there is no need of going out of Doors to get to them. The Beds are all very good, clean, and free from Bugs”—which obviously was not commonly the case, or there would have been no need for him to lay stress upon the fact. Notwithstanding the peculiar advantages of his house—its independence of Keating or his predecessors, and the convenience of guests not being obliged to walk out of doors to reach their bed-rooms—Tennent’s speculation was a failure, and on February 3rd, 1757, he died, heavily in debt. His creditors, at a loss what to do with the house, let it to his widow at a rent of £50 a year. When she died, in 1768, it was sold to James Graham, of the “Black Bull,” who carried it on, with much success, until his death in 1777. But although he was so successful with the “Saracen’s Head,” he was unfortunate in other directions and died bankrupt. He was succeeded by his widow, who in 1791 married one Buchanan, who seems to have been rather a wild person, and indeed himself went bankrupt in 1791, dying two years later. In 1792 the “Saracen’s Head” was purchased by William Miller; who, later, converted it into shops and tenements. The sign of the house was an enormous half-length picture of a turbaned Saracen, with goggling eyes, represented as fiercely drawing his scimitar, and habited in a claret-coloured gown, decorated with a red sash. This house was exceptionally famous as a literary landmark. In October 1773, Johnson and Boswell stayed two nights, on their return from the Hebrides; the poet Gray is thought to have met the brothers Foulis, the famous Glasgow printers, and to have concluded arrangements here for their edition of his poems, including the famous _Elegy_; Dorothy Wordsworth, in her “Journal,” under August 22nd, 1803, tells how pleased she and her brother were at last to leave the weary coach and find themselves in “the quiet little back parlour” of the “Saracen’s Head.”