birds.  Once in a while, a patient crowd may be seen loitering there all day, some eating fruit, some reading a newspaper; and to judge by their quiet demeanour, you would think they were waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets.  The fact is far otherwise; within in the Justiciary Court a man is upon trial for his life, and these are some of the curious for whom the gallery was found too narrow.  Towards afternoon, if the prisoner is unpopular, there will be a round of hisses when he is brought forth.  Once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, full of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening to an agent; and at certain regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the space.

The Parliament Close has been the scene of marking incidents in Scottish history.  Thus, when the Bishops were ejected from the Convention in 1688, ’all fourteen of them gathered together with pale faces and stood in a cloud in the Parliament Close:’  poor episcopal personages who were done with fair weather for life!  Some of the west-country Societarians standing by, who would have ‘rejoiced more than in great sums’ to be at their hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked their heads together.  It was not magnanimous behaviour to dethroned enemies; but one, at least, of the Societarians had groaned in the Boots, and they had all seen their dear friends upon the scaffold.  Again, at the ’woeful Union,’ it was here that people crowded to escort their favourite from the last of Scottish parliaments:  people flushed with nationality, as Boswell would have said, ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing stones at the author of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ as he looked out of window.

One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going to pass his trials (examinations as we now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament Close open and had a vision of the mouth of Hell.  This, and small wonder, was the means of his conversion.  Nor was the vision unsuitable to the locality; for after an hospital, what uglier piece is there in civilisation than a court of law?  Hither come envy, malice, and all uncharitableness to wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken fortunes, severed households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to this low building with the arcade.  To how many has not St. Giles’s bell told the first hour after ruin?  I think I see them pause to count the strokes, and wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and sick at heart.

A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a hall with a carved roof, hung with legal portraits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by windows of painted glass, and warmed by three vast fires.  This is the Salle DES Pas PERDUS of the Scottish Bar.  Here, by a ferocious custom, idle youths must promenade from ten till two.  From end to end, singly or in pairs or trios, the gowns and