Few cities have preserved more faithfully than Edinburgh the traditions of former days, and none is richer in the material of romance. Throughout the length of the Royal mile extending from Holyrood to the Castle Hill, each tortuous wynd and narrow close owns its peculiar association, each obscure court and towering “land” has contributed, if but by a footnote, to the volume of the city’s history. And where these visible memorials have perished beneath the slow assault of time, or succumbed to the more lethal methods of modern improvement, the legends which they embodied survive their dissolution and serve in turn to perpetuate their fame. Of the many memories that haunt the lover of old Edinburgh, wandering to-day among the vestiges of her romantic and insanitary past, perhaps the most curious is that of William Brodie, Deacon of the Wrights and doyen of the double life; by day “a considerable house carpenter” and member of the Town Council; by night a housebreaker and the companion of thieves. It is nearly a hundred and twenty years since Deacon Brodie played out his twofold part at the west end of the Luckenbooths one grey October afternoon in 1788; but the close in the Lawnmarket which bears his name remains to this day. Here he was born and lived, man and boy, robber and decent burgess, for many reputable years; here his old father passed away, happy in the possession of so excellent a son; and from hence did the son essay that “last fatal” adventure, the issue of which was, for him, discovery and the scaffold. The house itself has long since vanished--a victim to the indiscriminate destruction which has swept away so much else worthy of preservation. You can no longer see the heavy oaken door with the cunning lock of the Deacon’s own contriving, and the turnpike stair down which, with mask and lantern, he so often stole at midnight upon his secret and criminous affairs. But if you follow him in fancy down the High Street and past the Nether Bow, to where a gloomy “pend” leads into Chessel’s Court, you will find the tall front of the old Excise Office still rising within its “palisadoes,” behind which lurked the trembling Ainslie; and if it be about the dusk of the evening, and your imagination is informed with the spirit of the place, you may even see the man rush wildly forth from the doorway up the court, and hear, in the succeeding silence, the three blasts of an ivory whistle. * * * * *