We picture the said George Gourlay and his wife, of an evening, at the time of the history of Bell's Wynd, and other such wynds, when a change was taking place among the masses there. The New Town was beginning to hold out its aristocratic attractions to the grandees and wealthy merchants, who had chosen to live so long in so pent-up a place. Ay, many had left years before, or were leaving their lairs to be occupied by those who never thought they would live in houses with armorial bearings over the door. So it was that flats were shut up, and little wonder was created by the circumstance of windows being closed by inside shutters for years. The explanation simply was, that the good old family would come back to its old _lares_, or that no tenant could be got for the empty house. And then, of course, the furniture had flitted to the palaces beyond the North Loch; and what interest could there be in an empty house with the bare walls overhung by cobwebs, or gnawed into sinuosities by hungry rats, thus cruelly deserted by the cooks who ought to have fed them? Yet, in that same stair where Gourlay lived, there was a _door_ with a history that could not be explained in that easy way. "I say it puzzles me, guidwife Christian, and has done for years." "And mair it should me, George. You have been here only nine years, but 'tis now twenty-one since my father was carried to the West Kirk; and a year afore that I heard him say the house was left o' a morning: nor sound nor sigh o' human being has been heard in't since that hour." "And then the changes," said Geordie, "hae ta'en awa the auld folk whase gleg een would hae noticed it. As for Bailie or Dean o' Guild, nane o' them hae ever tirled the padlock." "But the factor, auld Dallas o' Lady Stair's Close, dee'd shortly after my father, and that will partly account for't." "It accounts for naething, guidwife Christian," rejoined he. "Whar's the laird? Men are sometimes forgetfu'; but what man, or woman either, ever forgets their property or heirlooms? Ye ken, love Christian," he continued, looking askance at her, half in seriousness and half in humour, "I am a blacksmith, and hae routh o' skeleton keys." "And never ane o' them will touch that padlock while I'm in your keeping, Geordie. I took ye for an honest man." An opposition or check which Gourlay did not altogether like; for, in secret truth, he had long contemplated an entry by these said skeleton keys, and, like all people who want a justification for some act they wish to perform, not altogether consistent with what is right, he had often in serious playfulness knocked his foot against the old worm-eaten, wood-rusted, dry-rotted door, as if he expected some confined ghost to shriek, like that unhappy spirit of the Buchan Caves, "Let me out, let me out!" whereupon Mr. Gourlay would have been, we doubt not, more humane than his old father-god, who would not let the pretty mother of love out of his iron net.