“As none of my relations can stand being present at my dissolution, I humbly request that your Lordship will permit ---- to attend, it will be some consolation in my last hour; and that your Lordship will please give orders that my body after be delivered to and by no means to remain in gaol; that he and my friends may have it decently dressed and interred. This is the last request of “Your most obedient but most unfortunate, WILL. BRODIE.” “Both of which requests,” we are told, “his Lordship most readily granted.” It is said, by the author of the letterpress in “Kay’s Portraits” (1877, vol. 1., pp. 262-3), on the authority of an eye-witness of the execution, that Brodie had been visited in prison by a French quack, Dr. Peter Degravers, who undertook to restore him to life after he had hung the usual time; that, on the day preceding the execution, this individual had marked the Deacon’s temples and arms with a pencil, in order to know the more readily where to apply his lancet; and that with this view the hangman had been bargained with for a short fall. “The excess of caution, however, exercised by the executioner in the first instance in shortening the rope proved fatal by his inadvertency in making it latterly too long. After he was cut down his body was immediately given to two of his own workmen, who, by order of the guard, placed it in a cart and drove at a furious rate round the back of the Castle. The object of this order was probably an idea that the jolting motion of the cart might be the means of resuscitation, as had once actually happened in the case of the celebrated ‘half-hangit Maggie Dickson.’ The body was afterwards conveyed to one of Brodie’s own workshops in the Lawnmarket, where Degravers was in attendance. He attempted bleeding, &c., but all would not do. Brodie was fairly gone.” The irregular practitioner above mentioned was certainly in Edinburgh about that time, for we read in the newspapers of the day advertisements, which he issued from his rooms in Charles Street, offering his professional services to the public at the moderate fee of half-a-crown “in all cases.” Judging by the testimonials from grateful patients which he also published, the doctor must have given wonderful value for the money; but in the somewhat exceptional circumstances of the Deacon’s case he would, if successful, have surely been entitled to a larger fee.