his tottering footsteps to his home.  When the time came for him to die he asked for I Corinthians xv., and after that had been read he remarked:  “Is not that a comfortable chapter?” There was also read to him Isaiah liii.  Asked if he could hear, he replied:  “I hear, I thank God, and understand far better.”  He afterwards said to his wife, “Read, where I cast my first anchor.”  Mrs. Knox knew what he meant, and read to him his favourite seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel.  His friend Bannatyne, seeing that he was just about to depart, and was becoming speechless, drew near to him saying, “Hast thou hope?” and asked him if he heard to give them a sign that he died in peace.  Knox pointed upwards with two of his fingers, and thus he died without a struggle.  Truly one of the most remarkable men that ever lived in Scotland, and whose end was peace.

[Illustration:  OLD TOWN FROM CALTON HILL.]

A vast concourse of people attended his funeral, the nobility walking in front of the procession, headed by Morton, who had been appointed Regent of Scotland on the very day on which Knox died, and whose panegyric at the grave was:  “Here lieth a man who in his life never feared the face of man.”

St. Giles’s was the first parochial church in Edinburgh, and its history dates from the early part of the twelfth century.  John Knox was appointed its minister at the Reformation.  When Edinburgh was created a bishopric, the Church of St. Giles became the Cathedral of the diocese.  A remarkable incident happened at this church on Sunday, July 23rd, 1639, when King Charles I ordered the English service-book to be used.  It was the custom of the people in those days to bring their own seats to church, in the shape of folding-stools, and just as Dean Hanney was about to read the collect for the day, a woman in the congregation named Jenny Geddes, who must have had a strong objection to this innovation, astonished the dean by suddenly throwing her stool at his head.  What Jenny’s punishment was for this violent offence we did not hear, but her stool was still preserved together with John Knox’s pulpit and other relics.

[Illustration:  ST. GILES’S CATHEDRAL, EDINBURGH.]

Although three hundred years save one had elapsed since John Knox departed this life, his memory was still greatly revered in Edinburgh, and his spirit still seemed to pervade the whole place and to dwell in the hearts and minds of the people with whom we came in contact.  A good illustration of this was the story related by an American visitor.  He was being driven round the city, when the coachman pointed out the residence of John Knox.  “And who was John Knox?” he asked.  The coachman seemed quite shocked that he did not know John Knox, and, looking down on him with an eye of pity, replied, in a tone of great solemnity, “Deed, mawn, an’ d’ye no read y’r Beeble!”

As we walked about the crowded streets of Edinburgh that Sunday evening we did not see a single drunken person, a fact which we attributed to the closing of public houses in Scotland on Sundays.  We wished that a similar enactment might be passed in England, for there many people might habitually be seen much the worse for liquor on Sunday evenings, to the great annoyance of those returning from their various places of worship.