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Four-and-thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street from the High School, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how, or why. When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a crowd at the Tron Church.
Eh, laddie! he continued, 'sic an end to ane wha was regairded as belongin' to the Saints! Wae's me for the godly, and again he lifted his eyes upward as a hound crying u-lu-lu for his lost master. Then he gave me a sharp look, somewhat askance, as he asked me swiftly, 'Whatten a discourse, think ye, will ye get frae your meenister o' the Tron Kirk the morn?
Giles' with its mural crown, the Tron Kirk in the distance, and the picturesque details of the buildings, all added to the effectiveness of the scene. At last the head of the gallant band appeared. The red coats gradually wedged their way through the crowd, amidst the ringing of bells and the cheers of the spectators.
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.
Thus old Edinburgh rises before us, beautiful and brave as she is no longer, yet thronged about the Netherbow Port, and up towards the Tron, the weighing-place and centre of city life, with fishwives and their stalls, with rough booths for the sale of rougher food, and with country lasses singing curds and whey, as they still did when Allan Ramsay nearly four hundred years after succeeded Dunbar as laureate of Edinburgh.
This witty work of satire, doubtless the production of some courtier, entitled "Madame de Saint Tron," has been interpreted by the modern author who has become proverbial as "the young doctor."
At this juncture a tall blackamoor tore by with our hero's medicine-chest upon his back. "You cut-throat! just wait for me!" yelled the Tarasconer as he ran after, with the knife uplifted. But Barbassou caught him in the spring, and holding him by the waist-sash, bade him be quiet. "Tron de ler! by the throne on high! they're no pirates. It's long since there were any pirates hereabout.
George of Seyton was crossing the causeway this morning with a score of men at his back, and had a ruffle with my friends of the house of Leslie they met at the Tron, and were fighting hard, when the provost, with his guard of partisans, came in thirdsman, and staved them asunder with their halberds, as men part dog and bear."
Captain Tron, who had been born on the Riviera and spoke English like an Oxonian, had been aide-de-camp to the Prince of Wales during that young gentleman's prolonged stay on the Italian front. He was selected by the Italian High Command to accompany us, I imagine, because of his ability to give intelligent answers to every conceivable sort of question, his tact, and his unfailing discretion.
Under the guidance of his trusty attendant, Colonel Mannering, after threading a dark lane or two, reached the High Street, then clanging with the voices of oyster-women and the bells of pye-men; for it had, as his guide assured him, just' chappit eight upon the Tron. It was long since Mannering had been in the street of a crowded metropolis, which, with its noise and clamour, its sounds of trade, of revelry, and of license, its variety of lights, and the eternally changing bustle of its hundred groups, offers, by night especially, a spectacle which, though composed of the most vulgar materials when they are separately considered, has, when they are combined, a striking and powerful effect on the imagination.
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