In the course of five weeks William Halket put his foot on the old pier of Leith, on which some very old men were standing, who had been urchins when he went away.  The look of the old harbour revived the image which had been imprinted on his mind when he sailed, and the running of the one image into the other produced the ordinary illusion of all that long interval appearing as a day; but there was no illusion in the change, that Mary Brown was there when he departed, and there was no Mary Brown there now.  Having called a coach, he told the driver to proceed up Leith Walk, and take him to Peter Ramsay’s inn, in St. Mary’s Wynd; but the man told him there was no inn there, nor had been in his memory.  The man added that he would take him to the White Horse in the Canongate, and thither accordingly he drove him.  On arriving at the inn, he required the assistance of the waiter to enable him to get out of the coach; nor probably did the latter think this any marvel, after looking into a face so furrowed with years, so pale with the weakness of a languid circulation, so saddened with care.  The rich man had only an inn for a home, nor in all his native country was there one friend whom he hoped to find alive.  Neither would a search help him, as he found on the succeeding day, when, by the help of his staff, he essayed an infirm walk in the great thoroughfare of the old city.  The houses were not much altered, but the signboards had got new names and figures; and as for the faces, they were to him even as those in Crete to the Cretan, after he awoke from a sleep of forty-seven years—­a similitude only true in this change, for Epimenidas was still as young when he awoke as when he went to sleep, but William Halket was old among the young and the grown, who were unknown to him, as he was indeed strange to them.  True, too, as the coachman said, Peter Ramsay’s inn, where he had heard Mary singing at her work, and the stable where he had whistled blithely among his favourite horses, were no longer to be seen—­etiam cineres perierunt—­their very sites were occupied by modern dwellings.  What of that small half-sunk lodging in Big Lochend Close, where Mary’s mother lived, and where Mary had been brought up, where perhaps Mary had died?  Would it not be a kind of pilgrimage to hobble down the Canongate to that little lodging, and might there not be for him a sad pleasure even to enter and sit down by the same fireplace where he had seen the dearly-beloved face, and listened to her voice, to him more musical than the melody of angels?

And so, after he had walked about till he was wearied, and his steps became more unsteady and slow, and as yet without having seen a face which he knew, he proceeded in the direction of the Big Close.  There was, as regards stone and lime, little change here; he soon recognised the half-sunk window where, on the Sunday evenings, he had sometimes tapped as a humorous sign that he was about to enter, which had often been responded