While the memorial cross erected on the King’s Crag had been thus occupying so much of his attention, the various works of restoration undertaken by him in Edinburgh were not neglected. They continued, indeed to engage his attention, and to furnish him with ever-renewed pleasure, till the close of his life. He thus writes to me in April 1887:--“St. Bernard’s Well is not quite finished yet, but it begins to look very different from what you will remember of it in our morning visits together: quite a little gem indeed, now that the mosaic work is done, or nearly so. A handsome parapet wall with railing runs along the river-side. The grounds are laid out, I think, in good taste, and a fine broad stair leads down from the street instead of the dingy back way you and I used to have to traverse in our morning visits to the well. Altogether it is a great success. The number of visitors to the well has greatly increased already; and if it correspondingly diminishes the number of visitors to the taverns, as I hope it will, then we have all the success that could be desired. You must repeat your visit to us soon, and have another tumbler of the water, and see all we have been doing in the way of improvement; it will be all in order before you arrive.” Again, in a postscript to one of his letters to the Rev. Charles Shaw, in the early part of the same year, he says: “My restorations at the Castle are getting on briskly. The Argyle Tower is far advanced, and as a piece of architecture it will be a great success. The hospital building has been made over to me, and operations for the restoration and conversion of it into what will be almost a facsimile of the old Parliament Hall have been already begun. It will be a very interesting building in its reformed condition.” In another letter to the same correspondent, who was an active member of the local committee for the erection of the memorial cross at Kinghorn, he thus writes:--“I send you a letter that I received a few days ago from Lord Napier. I asked him if he would come to the unveiling of the memorial to Alexander III., and let his voice be heard on the occasion as one of the speakers; but this, he says, he will be unable to do. The first part of the letter is of special interest to you, as it refers to some discoveries that have been made at the clearing out of the old Parliament Hall in the Castle. They have been so important that an almost perfect facsimile can be made of the hall as it was in the days of its glory: all except in the matter of the tapestry with which the walls were either wholly or partly covered; and it would be too much to hope for that any part of this should be to the fore at this time of day. Everything else is known. The roof exists in its entirety; parts of the floor have been found. It was of Arbroath pavement; and the account for the freight of the stones from Dundee to Leith has been recovered in the Rolls of the Exchequer in the Register Office.