"Maister Walter Fenton!--now, then, come forth instanter. Ye are required by the Lords of the Privy Council." A thrill shot through Walter's heart: he endeavoured in vain to suppress it, and, taking up his plain beaver hat, which was looped with a ribbon and cockade à la Monmouth in the military fashion, he descended the narrow spiral stair, preceded by the macer carrying his symbol of office on his right shoulder, and attired in a long flowing black gown. Two of the Town-guard, with their pole-axes, and Dunbraiken their captain,--a portly citizen, whose vast paunch, cased in corslet and backpiece, made him resemble a mighty tortoise erect,--kept close behind; and thus escorted, Walter set out from his prison, to appear before a select committee of the dreaded Privy Council of Scotland. Encumbered by his long official garb, Macer Maclutchy's step was none of the most steady. He was evidently after his evening potations at Lucky Dreeps; he wore his bonnet cocked well forward; and such a provoking smirk of vulgar importance pervaded his features when, from time to time, he surveyed his prisoner, that the latter was only restrained by the axes behind from knocking him down. In those days the hour of dinner was about one or two o'clock; but as the Earl of Perth, the Lords Clermistonlee, Mersington, and others loved their wine too well to leave it soon for dry matters of state, and the thumbscrewing of witches and non-conformists, the evening was far advanced before Walter Fenton was summoned for examination in the Laigh Chamber, where the Council held their meetings under the Parliament Hall, in a dark and gloomy region, where lights are always burned even yet during the longest days of summer. Passing a narrow pend or archway (where, in the following year, the Lord President Lockhart was shot by Chiesly of Dairy), Walter and his conductors issued into the dark and deserted Lawnmarket, passed the Heart of Midlothian, from the western platform of which, the black beam of the gibbet stretched its ghastly arm in the moonlight,--and reached the antique Parliament Square, a quadrangle of quaint architecture, which had recently been graced by a beautiful statue of Charles II. On one side rose the square tower and gigantic façade of St. Giles, with its traceried windows, its rich battlements and carved pinnacles all glittering in the moonlight, which poured aslant over several immense piles of building raised on Venetian arcades, and made all the windows of the Goldsmiths' Hall glitter with the same pale lustre that tipped the round towers of the Tolbooth, the square turrets and circular spire of the Parliament House, the whole front of which was involved in opaque and gloomy shadow, from which the grand equestrian statue of King Charles, edged by the glorious moonlight, stood vividly forth like a gigantic horseman of polished silver.