A ,
k i t h Walk.] JOHNNIE WILKES?
himself in her bedroom, ?with the intention of
carrying off a sum of money after she fell asleep.
But the noise of opening her desk awoke her; he,
for fear of detection, seized a knife which by accident
lay there, and mangled her throat so dreadfully
that she died next day. He then leaped from
a window of the second storey, but fractured one of
his legs so much in the fall that he was unable to
walk, and sustained himself for several days, eating
peas and turnips, until his hiding-place was discovered
He afterwards graced the gibbet in Leith
Walk, where his body hung for many a long year.?
In more than one instance on the King?s birth-
BRWNSTME HOUSE.
day the effigy of Johnnie Wilkes,? that noted
demagogue, Lord Mayor of London and English
M.P., who made himself so obnoxious to the Scots,
figured at the Gallow Lee. The custom, still prevalent
in many parts of the country, and so dear to
the Scottish schoolboy, of destroying his effigy
with every indignity on the royal birthday, is first
mentioned, we believe, in ?? Annals of the Reign of
George 111.f 1770.
But when only fields and green coppice lay between
the city and the seaport, the gibbet at the Gallow
Lee, with its ghastlyadditions,must have formed
a gloomy object amid the smiling urban landscape.
IN the beginning of the present century fields
and nursery grounds chiefly bordered Leith Walk,
CHAPTER XVI.
LEITH WALK (concZdd).
respectively Trotteis, Jollie?s, Ronaldson?s, and
King?s Buildings-had been erected, with long open
