To resume: poor Walter was intensely sad, for deeply at that moment he experienced the desolate feeling, that he was utterly alone in this wide world, and that within all its ample space there existed not one being with whom he could claim kindred. He felt that it was all a blank, a void to him; but his thoughts went back to those days when the suppression of the rising at Bothwell, struck terror and despair into the hearts of the Presbyterians, and filled the dungeons of the Scottish castles, and the Tolbooths of the cities with the much-enduring adherents of the Covenant, beneath the banner of which his father was supposed to have died with his sword in his hand--so with her dying lips had his mother told him, and his heart swelled and his eye moistened, as he recalled the time, the place, and her tremulous accents, with a vivid distinctness that wrung his breast with the tenderest sorrow, even after the lapse of so many years. During the summer of 1679 those citizens of Edinburgh, whose mansions commanded a view of the Grey friars kirkyard, beheld from their windows a daily scene of suffering such as had never before been seen in Scotland. This ancient burial-place lies to the south of the long ridge occupied by the ancient city; it is spacious, irregular, and surrounded by magnificent tombs, many of them being of great antiquity, and marking the last resting-places of those who were eminent for their virtues and talents, or distinguished by their birth. It is a melancholy place withal. For three hundred years never a day has passed without many persons being interred there; and the hideous clay, the yellow and many-coloured loam, that had once lived and breathed, and loved and spoken, has now risen several feet above the adjacent street, against the walls of the great old church in the centre, and has buried the basements of the quaint and dark monuments that surround it. The inscriptions and grotesque carving of the latter, have long since been encrusted and blackened by the smoke of the city, or worn and obliterated by the corroding and fetid atmosphere of the great grave-yard. There is not a spot in all the Lothians where the broad-leaved docken, the rank dog-grass, the long black nettle, and other weeds grow so luxuriantly, for terrible is the mass of human corruption, for ever festering and decaying beneath the verdant turf.