Chapter 3

THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.

TIME has wrought its changes most notably around the
precincts of St. Giles's Church. The church itself, if
it were not for the spire, would be unrecognisable; the
KRAMES are all gone, not a shop is left to shelter in its
buttresses; and zealous magistrates and a misguided
architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it
poor, naked, and pitifully pretentious. As St. Giles's
must have had in former days a rich and quaint appearance
now forgotten, so the neighbourhood was bustling,
sunless, and romantic. It was here that the town was
most overbuilt; but the overbuilding has been all rooted
out, and not only a free fair-way left along the High
Street with an open space on either side of the church,
but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of the
LANDS, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town.

There is a silly story of a subterranean passage
between the Castle and Holyrood, and a bold Highland
piper who volunteered to explore its windings. He made
his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey; the
curious footed it after him down the street, following
his descent by the sound of the chanter from below; until
all of a sudden, about the level of St. Giles's, the
music came abruptly to an end, and the people in the
street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he
was choked with gases, or perished in a quag, or was
removed bodily by the Evil One, remains a point of doubt;
but the piper has never again been seen or heard of from
that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the land
of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least
expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper
world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on
the stance besides St. Giles's, when they hear the drone
of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the earth
below their horses' feet.

But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a
solid bulk of masonry has been likewise spirited into the
air. Here, for example, is the shape of a heart let into
the causeway. This was the site of the Tolbooth, the
Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and namefather
to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust;
there is no more SQUALOR CARCERIS for merry debtors, no
more cage for the old, acknowledged prison-breaker; but
the sun and the wind play freely over the foundations of
the jail. Nor is this the only memorial that the
pavement keeps of former days. The ancient burying-
ground of Edinburgh lay behind St. Giles's Church,
running downhill to the Cowgate and covering the site of
the present Parliament House. It has disappeared as
utterly as the prison or the Luckenbooths; and for those
ignorant