as a public-house and
tap-room, and had been the scene of a somewhat rough, and, I daresay,
not very respectable, but yet profitable trade; but no sooner had it
become mine than, in consequence of some alterations in the harbour, the
greater part of the shipping that used to lie at the Coal-hill removed
to a lower reach; the tap-room business suddenly fell off; and the rent
sank, during the course of one twelvemonth, from twenty-four to twelve
pounds. And then in its sear and wintry state, the unhappy house came to
be inhabited by a series of miserable tenants, who, though they
sanguinely engaged to pay the twelve pounds, never paid them. I still
remember the brief, curt letters from our agent, the late Mr. Veitch,
town-clerk of Leith, that never failed to fill my mother with terror and
dismay, and very much resembled, in at least the narrative parts,
jottings by the poet Crabbe, for some projected poem on the profligate
poor. Two of our tenants made moonlight flittings just on the eve of the
term; and though the little furniture which they left behind them was
duly rouped at the cross, such was the inevitable expense of the
transaction, that none of the proceeds of the sale reached Cromarty. The
house was next inhabited by a stout female, who kept a certain
description of lady-lodgers; and for the first half-year she paid the
rent most conscientiously; but the authorities interfering, there was
another house found for her and her ladies in the neighbourhood of the
Calton, and the rent of the second half-year remained unpaid. And as the
house lost, in consequence of her occupation, the modicum of character
which it had previously retained, it lay for five years wholly
untenanted, save by a mischievous spirit--the ghost, it was said, of a
murdered gentleman, whose throat had been cut in an inner apartment by
the ladies, and his body flung by night into the deep mud of the
harbour. The ghost was, however, at length detected by the police,
couching in the form of one of the ladies themselves, on a lair of straw
in the corner of one of the rooms, and exorcised into Bridewell; and
then the house came to be inhabited by a tenant who had both the will
and the ability to pay. One year's rent, however, had to be expended in
repairs; and ere the next year passed, the heritors of the parish were
rated for the erection of the magnificent parish church of North Leith,
then in course of building, with its tall and graceful spire and c