Ever with the same details the time-honoured proceeding may be witnessed on the night of any 31st day of December at the Cross of the ancient city of St Mungo.
Some time before midnight the roar of the day’s traffic has died out of the streets. The great warehouses are closed, and their windows gaze, like sightless eyes, into the deserted thoroughfares. To one imbued with the spirit of the hour, it is as if the city herself were thinking of the past; and the sudden sweep of wind that comes and dies away seems a sigh of regret for her departed glories. Many memories cluster about this ancient heart of Glasgow; and at such an hour, and upon such a night, it would seem little more than natural if the historic figures of the past should move again abroad. Strangely enough, too, the creatures of imagination present a no less tangible presence to the mind’s eye than the real persons of bygone days. Behind the tall, limping figure of Sir Walter Scott, a curious visitor here, the equally immortal Bailie picks his steps; and as the bold Rob Roy strides past into the shadow, there is heard the tramp of Cromwell’s bodyguard and the clatter of the Regent Moray’s cavalry. For it was out by the Gallowgate here, and across the river by the Briggate, that the troops of the Protestant lords marched in 1568 to the battle of Langside; and at the head of Saltmarket the Protector Cromwell quartered himself in 1650, issued his orders, and held levees. In the Gallowgate yet, though sore transformed from its ancient glory, stands that once-famous inn, the Saracen’s Head, at which the learned Dr Johnson put up while passing through Glasgow on his Hebridean tour. Close by the Cross, where the street lamps shine on the shuttered windows of a great east-end warehouse, stood the town-house of the Earls of Lennox; and past it, up the gentle hill, and still wearing something of its old-world look, bends the High Street with its memories. Out of sight up there the façade of the venerable College, _alma mater_ of Campbell the poet, Smollett the novelist, Archbishop Tait, and a host of great divines, was wont for over four hundred years to frown upon the pavement. The Vandal, however, has at last prevailed against it. A few paces farther and the gigantic form of Sir William Wallace still seems to slaughter his enemies at the Bell o’ the Brae. And beyond all, on the slope of the hollow where the classic Molendinar once flowed, surrounded in the darkness by its city of the dead, stands the grey cathedral of St Kentigern.