bank-porter, stricken to the heart at
a blow and left in his blood within a step or two of the crowded High
Street. There, people hush their voices over Burke and Hare; over drugs
and violated graves, and the resurrection-men smothering their victims
with their knees. Here, again, the fame of Deacon Brodie is kept piously
fresh. A great man in his day was the Deacon; well seen in good society,
crafty with his hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who could sing a song
with taste. Many a citizen was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper,
and dismissed him with regret at a timeous hour, who would have been
vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and in what guise, his
visitor returned. Many stories are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh
burglar, but the one I have in my mind most vividly gives the key of all
the rest. A friend of Brodie's, nested some way towards heaven in one of
these great _lands_, had told him of a projected visit to the country,
and afterwards, detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed the
night in town. The good man had lain some time awake; it was far on in
the small hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly there came a creak, a
jar, a faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a false
window which looked upon another room, and there, by the glimmer of a
thieves' lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a mask. It is
characteristic of the town and the town's manners that this little
episode should have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time
elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a Bow Street runner, a
cock-fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in Amsterdam, and a last step
into the air off his own greatly improved gallows drop, brought the
career of Deacon William Brodie to an end. But still, by the mind's eye,
he may be seen, a man harassed below a mountain of duplicity, slinking
from a magistrate's supper-room to a thieves' ken, and pickeering among
the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp.

Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some memory lingers of the
great plagues, and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the
memory of man. For in time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp
and sudden, and what we now call "stamping out contagion" was carried on
with deadly rigour. The officials, in their gowns of grey, with a white
St. Andrew's cross on back and breast, and white cloth carried before
them on a staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of m