her knees in Windsor or Balmoral, the Grassmarket of Edinburgh
was still a bit of the Middle Ages, as picturesquely decaying and
Gothic as German Nuremberg. Beside the classic corn exchange, it
had no modern buildings. North and south, along its greatest
length, the sunken quadrangle was faced by tall, old,
timber-fronted houses of stone, plastered like swallows' nests to
the rocky slopes behind them.

Across the eastern end, where the valley suddenly narrowed to the
ravine-like street of the Cowgate, the market was spanned by the
lofty, crowded arches of George IV Bridge. This high-hung,
viaduct thoroughfare, that carried a double line of buildings
within its parapet, leaped the gorge, from the tall, old, Gothic
rookeries on High Street ridge, just below the Castle esplanade.
It cleared the roofs of the tallest, oldest houses that swarmed
up the steep banks from the Cowgate, and ran on, by easy descent,
to the main gateway of Greyfriars kirkyard at the lower top of
the southern rise.

Greyfriars' two kirks formed together, under one continuous roof,
a long, low, buttressed building without tower or spire. The new
kirk was of Queen Anne's day, but the old kirk was built before
ever the Pilgrims set sail for America. It had been but one of
several sacred buildings, set in a monastery garden that sloped
pleasantly to the open valley of the Grassmarket, and looked up
the Castle heights unhindered. In Bobby's day this garden had
shrunk to a long, narrow, high-piled burying-ground, that
extended from the rear of the line of buildings that fronted on
the market, up the slope, across the hilltop, and to where the
land began to fall away again, down the Burghmuir. From the