But up then raise all Edinburgh.
They all rose up by thousands three.
Johnnie Armstrang's Goodnight.
Butler, on his departure from the sign of the Golden Nag, went in quest of a
friend of his connected with the law, of whom he wished to make particular
inquiries concerning the circumstances in which the unfortunate young woman
mentioned in the last chapter was placed, having, as the reader has probably
already conjectured, reasons much deeper than those dictated by mere humanity
for interesting himself in her fate. He found the person he sought absent from
home, and was equally unfortunate in one or two other calls which he made upon
acquaintances whom he hoped to interest in her story. But everybody was, for
the moment, stark-mad on the subject of Porteous, and engaged busily in
attacking or defending the measures of Government in reprieving him; and the
ardour of dispute had excited such universal thirst, that half the young lawyers
and writers, together with their very clerks, the class whom Butler was looking
after, had adjourned the debate to some favourite tavern. It was computed by an
experienced arithmetician, that there was as much twopenny ale consumed on
the discussion as would have floated a first-rate man-of-war.
Butler wandered about until it was dusk, resolving to take that opportunity of
visiting the unfortunate young woman, when his doing so might be least
observed; for he had his own reasons for avoiding the remarks of Mrs.
Saddletree, whose shop-door opened at no great distance from that of the jail,
though on the opposite or south side of the street, and a little higher up. He
passed, therefore, through the narrow and partly covered passage leading from
the north-west end of the Parliament Square.
He stood now before the Gothic entrance of the ancient prison, which, as is well
known to all men, rears its ancient front in the very middle of the High Street,
forming, as it were, the termination to a huge pile of buildings called the
Luckenbooths, which, for some inconceivable reason, our ancestors had jammed
into the midst of the principal street of the town, leaving for passage a narrow
street on the north; and on the south, into which the prison opens, a narrow
crooked lane, winding betwixt the high and sombre walls of the Tolbooth and the
adjacent houses on the one side, and the butresses and projections of the old
Cathedral upon the other. To give some gaiety to this sombre passage (well
known by the name of the Krames), a number of little booths, or shops, after the
fashion of cobblers' stalls, are plastered, as it were, against the Gothic
projections and abutments, so that it seemed as if the traders had occupied with
nests, bearing the same proportion to the building, every buttress and coign of
vantage, as the martlett did in Macbeth's Castle. Of later years these booths
