The late king had made every kind of dissipation fashionable; and after night-fall the gallants of the city swaggered about the Craimes or the Abbey-Close, muffled in their cloaks like conspirators; and despite the axes of the city guard, and the halberds of the provost, excesses were committed hourly; and seldom a night passed without the clash of rapiers and the shouts of cavalier brawlers being heard ringing in the dark thoroughfares of the city. Thieves were hanged, coiners were quartered, covenanters beheaded, and witches burned, until executions failed to excite either interest or horror; but with the plumed and buff-booted Ruffler of the day, who brawled and fought from a sheer love of mischief and wine, what plebeian baillie or pumpkin-headed city-guard would have dared to find fault? Of this more anon. Stumbling through the dark streets, the party of soldiers marched past the Pleasance Porte, above the arch of which grinned a white row of five bare skulls, which had been bleaching there since 1681. Every barrier of Edinburgh was garnished with these terrible trophies of maladministration. Leaving behind them the ancient suburb, they diverged upon the road near the old ruined convent of St. Mary of Placentia, which, from the hill of St. Leonard, reared up its ivied walls in shattered outline. Beyond, and towering up abruptly from the lonely glen below, frowned the tremendous front of Salisbury craigs. The rising moon showed its broad and shining disc, red and fiery above their black rocks, and fitfully between the hurrying clouds, its rays streamed down the Hauze, a deep and ghastly defile, formed by some mighty convulsion of nature, when these vast craigs had been rent from that ridgy mountain, where King Arthur sat of old, and watched his distant gallies on the waters of the Roman Bodoria. For a moment the moonlight streamed down the defile, on the hill of St. Leonard, with its thatched cottages and ruined convent, on the glancing armour of the soldiers, and the bare trees bordering the highway; again the passing clouds enveloped it in opaque masses, and all was darkness. "Sergeant Wemyss," cried the cavalier officer, breaking the silence which had till then been observed. "Here, an't please your honour," responded the halberdier. "Where tarries that loitering abbeylubber, who was to have joined us on the march?" "The Macer?" "Ay, he with the council's warrant for this dirty work." "Yonder he stands, I believe, your honour, by the ruins of the mass-monging days," replied the sergeant, pointing to a figure which a passing gleam of the moon revealed emerging from the ruins. "Mean you that tall spunger in the red Rocquelaure? To judge by his rapier and feather, he is a gentleman, but one that seems to watch us. So, ho, sir! a good even; you are late abroad to-night."