Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats.  I have seen one afternoon, as many as thirteen of them seated on the grass beside old Milne, the Master Builder, all sleek and fat, and complacently blinking, as if they had fed upon strange meats.  Old Milne was chaunting with the saints, as we may hope, and cared little for the company about his grave; but I confess the spectacle had an ugly side for me; and I was glad to step forward and raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town, and the spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed against the sky with the colourless precision of engraving.  An open outlook is to be desired from a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the world’s beauty relieves a mind from morbid thoughts.

I shall never forget one visit.  It was a grey, dropping day; the grass was strung with rain-drops; and the people in the houses kept hanging out their shirts and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the weather turned from wet to fair and back again.  A grave-digger, and a friend of his, a gardener from the country, accompanied me into one after another of the cells and little courtyards in which it gratified the wealthy of old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood.  In one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human effigy, very realistically executed down to the detail of his ribbed stockings, and holding in his hand a ticket with the date of his demise.  He looked most pitiful and ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct, like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten deity under a new dispensation; the burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the rain dripped all round him; and the world maintained the most entire indifference as to who he was or whither he had gone.  In another, a vaulted tomb, handsome externally but horrible inside with damp and cobwebs, there were three mounds of black earth and an uncovered thigh bone.  This was the place of interment, it appeared, of a family with whom the gardener had been long in service.  He was among old acquaintances.  ‘This’ll be Miss Marg’et’s,’ said he, giving the bone a friendly kick.  ‘The auld — !’ I have always an uncomfortable feeling in a graveyard, at sight of so many tombs to perpetuate memories best forgotten; but I never had the impression so strongly as that day.  People had been at some expense in both these cases:  to provoke a melancholy feeling of derision in the one, and an insulting epithet in the other.  The proper inscription for the most part of mankind, I began to think, is the cynical jeer, CRAS TIBI.  That, if anything, will stop the mouth of a carper; since it both admits the worst and carries the war triumphantly into the enemy’s camp.