he 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 gravedigger, 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.

Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There was one window in a
house at the lower end, now demolished, which was pointed out to me by
the gravedigger as a spot of legendary interest. Burke, the
resurrection-man, infamous for so many murders at five shillings a head,
used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going
forward on the green. In a tomb higher up, which must then have been but
newly finished, John Knox, according to the same informant, had taken
refuge in a turmoil of the Reformation. Behind the churc