Bell?s Mills.] LADY SINCLAIR. 63
portray. She was born Margaret Learmouth, at
~ 6 , St John Street, in the Canongate, in January)
1794, while that street and much of the neighbour.
hood around it were still the centre of the literaq
and fashionable society of the then secluded
capital of Scotland.
Thus she was old enough to have seen and
known many who were ? QUt with the Prince ? b
1745, and reminiscences of these people and 01
their days were ever a favourite theme with hei
when she had a sympathetic listener. ?Old
maiden ladies,? she was wont to say, with a sort 01
sad pitifulness in her tone, ?were the last lea1
Jacobites in Edinburgh ; spinsterhood in its loneli.
ness remained then ever true to Prince Charlit
and the vanished dreams of youth.? Lady Sinclaii
used to relate how in the old Episcopal Chapel in
the Cowgate, now St. Patrick?s Church, the last
solitary representative of these Jacobite ladies nevei
failed to close her prayer-book and stand erect, in
d e n t protest, when the prayer for King George 111.
?( and the reigning family ? was read in the Church
Service. Early in her girlhood her family removed
from St. John Street to Picardy Place, and the
following adventure, which she used to relate,
curiously evinces the difference between the social
customs of the early years of this century and those
of the present day.
? Once, when she was returning from a ball, the
bearers of her sedan-chair had their bonnets carried
off by the wind, while the street oil-lamps were
blown out, and the ? Donalds ? departed in pursuit
of their head-gear. It was customary in those
times for gentlemen to escort the sedan-chairs
that held their fair partners of the evening, and
the two gentlemen who were with her-the Duke
af Argyle and Sir John Clerk of Penicuickseized
hold of the spokes and carried her home.
?Gentlemen were gentlemen in those days,? she was
wont to add, ?and Edinburgh was the proper
residence of the Scottish aristocracy-not an inn
.or a half-way house between London and the
Highland muirs.? ?
In 1821 she was married to Mr. Sinclair, afterwards
Sir John Sinclair, Bart., of Dunbeath, and
for fifty years afterwards her home was at the
House of Barock, in Caithness, where her influence
among the poor was ever felt and gratefully
acknowledged. She was a staunch and
amusingly active Liberal, and, with faculties clear
and unimpaired in the last week of her long life,
noted and commented on Mr. Gladstone?s famous
? hlidlothian speeches,? and rejoiced over his
success. She was always scrupulously dressed,
and in the drawing-room down to the day of
her death. She saw all her children die before
her, in early or middle life; her eldest, Colonel
Sinclair, dying in India in his forty-fifth year. After
Sir John?s death she settled in Edinburgh.
?I am the last leaf on the outmost bough,?
she was wont to say, ?and want to fall where I
was born.? And so she passed away.
When she was interred within the Chapel Royal
at Holyrood, it was supposed that she would be one
of the last to whom that privilege would be accorded.
It was not so ; for the remains of James,
Earl of Caithness, who died in America, were laid
there in April, 1881.
The Dean, or Den, seems to have been the old
general name for the rocky hollow now spanned
by the stately bridge of Telford.
Bell?s Mills, a hamlet deep down in a grassy
glen, with an old bridge, aver which for ages lay
the only road to the Queensferry, and now overshadowed
by fashionable terraces and crescents, is
described by Kincaid in 1787 as a village, ?one and
three-quarter niiles north-west of Edinburgh, on the
north bank of the Water of Leith, and .a quarter
of a mile west of West Leith village.? * It received
its name from an old proprietor of the
flour-mills, which are still grinding there, and have
been long in existence. ?? On Thursday night
last,? says the Zdinburgh Advertseer of 3rd January:
1764, ? the high wall at Bells Brae, near the
Water of Leith Bridge, fell down, by which accident
the footpath and part of the turnpike road are
carried away, which makes it hazardous for carriages.
This notice may be of use to those who have
occasion to pass that road.?
At the head of the road here, near the Dean
Bridge, is a Free Church, built soon after the
Disruption-a little edifice in the Saxon style, with
a square tower ; and a quaint little ancient crowstepped
building, once a toll-house, has built into
it some of the old sculpture from the Dean House.
At the foot of the road, adjoining Bell?s Mills
Bridge, are old Sunbury distillery and house, in a
lelta formed by the Leith, which sweeps under a
steep and well-wooded bank which is the boundary
3f the Dean Cemetery.
The Water of Leith village, which bears marks of
peat antiquity, is fast disappearing amid the enxoachments
of modern streets, and yet all that renains
of it, deep down in the rocky hollow, where
:he stream, flowing under its quaint old bridge,
3etween ancient mills, pours in a foaming sheet
wer a high, broad weir, is wonderfully striking
ind picturesque. Dates, inscriptions, crowstepped
:ables, and other features of the seventeenth
:entury, abound here in profusion.
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